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THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 



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THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 



BY 

ALBERT G. KELLER 

PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY 

IN TALE ONIVERSITY 

AUTHOR OF "societal EVOLUTION ' 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1918 

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INTRODUCTION 

There is a growing sentiment in this country 
that what Germany has come to stand for is 
utterly irreconcilable with all those acquisitions 
of human society — freedom, democracy, hu- 
manity, Christianity — which we most prize ; 
that it represents a grave menace to them all. 
This sentiment, with its attendant foreboding, I 
believe to be substantially correct, so that it 
will bear examination in the light of reason and 
science. I think it can be shown that the Ger- 
man code of international behavior constitutes a 
direct and grave challenge to the essentials of 
civilization ; that it is a reversion toward an 
earlier and cruder phase of societal development ; 
and that it must be extirpated if civilization is 
to go forward on its normal course. 

If reason is to be found back of this popular 
presentiment, that fact will confer a certain solid- 
ity and surety upon what we might otherwise, in 
the face of specious argument or unpleasant 
consequences, cleave to less tenaciously. It will 
lead to the strengthening of hearts. But strong 



vi INTRODUCTION 

hearts are what we require in these times ; for 
the world is tiring under the burden of its loss 
and misery, and even the sturdiest has need of 
holding his convictions fast. There is also an 
indeterminate number who are less firm in the 
faith, and who are likely to falter unless they are 
fortified by an abiding belief that this challenge 
to civilization must and can be met and repelled, 
if we faint not. They need to be shown that 
relentlessness in the exaction of "restitution, 
reparation, and guarantees" is not an expression 
of rage and revengefulness, but rather of the 
highest form of humanity — of interest in the 
welfare of all men, to be secured, in this case, by 
relieving the race of the German peril. It is 
" Through War to Peace," and not otherwise. 
A faith has never been weakened by the demon- 
stration that it had reason behind it. 

Some of us are further convinced that this 
peril is certain to be eliminated, now or later, by 
the operation of the elemental forces which have 
made civilization what it is. Here is a cause 
that cannot fail. But we want it to triumph now 
rather than later. For it is at the cost of much 
human agony that the operation of these ele- 
mental forces is hindered and retarded, through 
a failure to understand and work with them ; 



INTRODUCTION vii 

and their action may be hastened, with the result 
of sparing human suffering, if we seek to under- 
stand and fall in with their massive stress and 
do not, for the sake of petty sentiment, throw 
ourselves, as chosen victims, across their path. 
This issue is going to be settled aright despite 
human foolishness — despite even an easy-going 
and irrelevant "magnanimity " ; and if we can see 
that now, and not try to stop the process short of 
a definitive decision, we shall save ourselves and 
those that come after us an infinity of suffering. 

A rational justification for such convictions 
appears, I think, in the following pages. Events 
even so startling as those of the present fall into 
line as episodes of society's development, if the 
course of that development is seen in perspective 
— in the light, that is, of a general survey of 
societal evolution, made with no special reference 
to any one of its episodes as compared with the 
rest. But it is impossible to present this war 
in such a perspective without devoting some 
pages to an indication of the line of approach 
here adopted, and without using a minimum of 
terminology. This clearing of the ground will 
doubtless slow up the pace of presentation ap- 
preciably, but it has to be done if the conclusions 
in the last few chapters — to which the reader 



viii INTRODUCTION 

who is impatient of the approach may refer — 
are to carry more weight than they would as 
mere expressions of personal opinion. 

Whatever enlightenment this essay has to offer 
is due to the fact that societies are here viewed as 
wholes and not in terms of their ultimate compo- 
nents, namely, individuals. Much is said of the 
dominance in societal evolution of the automatic, 
spontaneous, and impersonal, as against the 
individual and purposeful. It is in part for the 
sake of emphasizing this point of approach that 
I use the adjective "societal," meaning "of 
society," instead of "social," which has no pre- 
cise meaning. It is my belief that the great mass 
of individuals pursue their petty interests as they 
see them, close at hand, in virtual unconscious- 
ness of the wide interests of the society, while 
the society moves ponderously on, under laws of 
its own, through a succession of phases which 
the individual has to accept, much as he accepts 
climate or rainfall, as conditions of life. The 
occasional endowed individual identifies the im- 
personal forces in the field and seems to control 
them, much as does the engineer, by moving things 
into or out of their way ; but the vast bulk of 
mankind live on unconscious of their very exist- 
ence, or vaguely sensing it. 



INTRODUCTION ix 

There is a confused view of society that may 
be gotten by preoccupation with the individual, 
his psychology and his "choices"; then there is 
another, which seems to some of us to oflFer 
superior clarity, that takes account of the indi- 
vidual as the ultimate component of society and 
then sets him aside. The latter view is the one 
taken here. It is not so obvious as the other 
and demands emphasis ; but any one who has 
caught it once will not be much disturbed by the 
absence of fine balancings and whittlings in the 
pages that are to follow. 

Rightly or wrongly, I find myself in no great 
doubt or anxiety as to the ultimate outcome of 
this international conflict. My conclusions, as 
worked out for my own satisfaction, are something 
of a comfort to me; and I hope they may be of 
use to others, in particular to those who, just 
because they are enviably able to lend the strength 
of their arms to the cause of civilization and 
human freedom, have the less leisure to reflect 
over the wider aspects of the conflict. 

A. G. K. 

Nkw Haven, December 27, 1917. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction v 

I. The Impersonal Character of the 

Issue 1 

n. Unforeseen Consequences to Society . 7 
in. Automatic Adjustments . . • .15 

IV. A People's War 27 

V. Folkways and Societal Codes of Con- 
duct .....••• 35 
VI. Conflict an Essential to Selection: 

Peaceful Competition .... 46 

VII. Public Opinion and the National Code . 58 

VIII. The International Peace-Group . . 73 

IX. The International Code .... 82 

X. The German Code 98 

XI. The Challenge to the International 

Code 108 

XII. The Formation of a World-Opinion . 118 

Xm. Selection by War 128 

XIV. German Fetish-Worship . . . .139 
XV. The One Way to Upset the Fetish . . 149 
XVI. On Faltering at the Finish . . .161 
XVII. On Intelligent Adjustment to the In- 
evitable 1'3 

xi 



THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

I. THE IMPERSONAL CHARACTER OF 
THE ISSUE 

To all of us most of the time, and to most of 
us all of the time, the course of this war has been 
a succession of particular events and of the doings 
of particular persons. The head-lines are scanned 
to see whether the battle-lines have changed, 
whether this or that wavering neutral has thrown 
its lot into the struggle, whether the prospects 
of the Loan have improved, and so on. Even 
more typical of our attitude is the interest in 
persons. What has been said overnight by 
Lloyd George, the German Chancellor, Trotzky, 
President Wilson, Colonel Roosevelt.'' Has Edi- 
son discovered anything? Has Hoover any new 
project.'* Are there any more revelations from 
the Department of State concerning German 
diplomacy ? Or — a matter of still more in- 
timate personal interest — is the acquaintance, 
B 1 



2 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

friend, brother, or son about to be called? Is 
the reader of the day's news himself to be 
drafted ? 

We cannot help being interested in these im- 
mediate things. That is the way we live — 
amidst the definite and immediate ; and then 
we think with less strain if we think in terms of 
persons. In fact, the race has always personal- 
ized the less tangible and more abstract things, 
for by such means it has been possible to tie up 
floating and evasive conceptions so that they can 
be found again and dealt with. The vast im- 
personalities that control our destiny — Nature, 
Chance, God — are rendered into terms that 
men are more used to handle. It is as if one 
should meet some difficult proposition, full of 
subtleties of thought, in a partially known foreign 
language; he will feel more secure^jf he gets it 
across into the mother-tongue before he tries 
to do much with it. The de-personalization of 
what has been long personalized has demanded a 
tedious process of mental discipline and develop- 
ment. "It is diflficult," writes Darwin, "to 
avoid personifying the word Nature"; and he 
warns against the superficial interpretation that 
is commonly put upon the term by the reader, 
although the author is employing it, for brevity's 



IMPERSONAL CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE 3 

sake, to cover "the aggregate action and product 
of many natural laws." 

But absorption with the immediate and per- 
sonal, though natural enough, does not make 
for comprehensiveness of view. It prevents us 
from seeing the woods for the trees. To see the 
woods, it is necessary to secure distance and 
detachment. Yet a view of the woods is some- 
times most desirable, especially if one is confused 
by the number and apparently unmeaning loca- 
tion of the trees. To see the forest it is necessary 
to get outside of it, whether that be done by some- 
how ascending above it, or by having recourse 
to the mind's eye and viewing the broad lay of 
the land from the mapped-out results of the 
experience of others. 

I suppose that no one will quarrel very much 
over the aptness of this analogy to the present 
facts. In the matter of this war-situation we 
are wandering in the woods, and most of us are 
concerned as to where we are and how and at 
what place we are going to get out. But the 
analogy is employed merely by way of setting 
the situation before us ; it is not conceived to 
carry any weight of argument. 

In viewing the course of the war, then, atten- 
tion has been much focussed upon persons — 



4 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

personages, perhaps, might be the better term. 
But this tendency goes farther. Human groups, 
such as the Bolsheviki, the War Council, the 
pacifists, and even larger groups or societies, 
as the Belgians, Jugo-Slavs, Entente Allies, or 
Neutrals, are seen as a combination of the in- 
dividuals that compose them rather than in their 
impersonal corporate form. In fact, we are 
prone to think of any human society, or of Society 
in general, in terms of its components rather 
than as an entity in and of itself. We also tend 
to personify Society as we do Nature, and do not 
ordinarily think of it (to adapt Darwin's words) as 
the aggregate action and product of many societal 
laws. 

This conception of human society as a sort of 
composite of individuals, having no special being 
of its own, is an easy and obvious one ; and it 
has been elaborated by theorists. These hold, 
briefly stated, that to understand society the 
object of interest and study is the individual ; 
and that, since the mind of the latter is the part 
of him that attends to his social relations and 
interactions, the prime object in the study of 
society is to become clear on individual psy- 
chology. Study the human intellect and you are 
on the way to an understanding of the "social 



IMPERSONAL CHARACTER OF THE ISSUE 5 

mind," which directs society's destiny. Then 
presently you issue into "social psychology" or 
"psychological sociology," and the keys to the 
whole matter are delivered into your hands. 
Social development, we are told, is the result of 
the reasoned and purposeful action of the in- 
dividual. An extreme of this view would, with 
Carlyle, see the history of a nation in the biog- 
raphy of its heroic figures. A social philosophy 
of this order is a popular one, for it lends learned 
support to that current prejudice toward interest 
in the personal and immediate (which we think 
we know without so much study, living in it as 
we do) to which allusion was made at the outset. 

It is the object of the present writing, however, 
to present that vast episode in societal evolution 
(meaning the evolution of human society), which 
is working itself out before our eyes, from an 
altogether different point of view — one which 
recognizes the individual as a component part of 
society, and then ignores him, much as the phys- 
iologist recognizes the cell as the undoubted 
final component of the body, but then ignores it 
in favor of a study of the body as a whole. The 
body is an object of study by itself, and results 
are gotten from physiology that could not be 
attained by restricting attention to the cell. I 



6 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

do not intend, though, to enter into a technical 
controversy, but rather to cite, first, a series of 
societal changes belonging to the war-period, and 
for whose appearance the reasoned purposefulness 
of the individual does not seem responsible ; and 
then to present the advantages of what is to me 
a more commanding point of view for the obser- 
vation and understanding of the societal forma- 
tions and dissolutions that are taking place as the 
days go by. 



II. UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES TO 
SOCIETY 

Societal changes of great moment have taken 
place, not only in Europe, but in the rest of the 
world as well, since the war began. I do not 
refer so much to the almost complete national 
destruction of Belgium or Serbia, under the iron 
heel itself, as to the less direct consequences of 
the strife. I take examples almost at random, as 
they suggest themselves. In England there has 
come to pass a centralization of government, 
together with a decline of parliamentary control, 
that must startle the elderly Briton who contem- 
plates it. Again, the women are doing men's 
work, are beginning, in large numbers, to work 
for wages, and they are not very far from getting 
the full franchise. The Irish question has taken 
on a new phase. There is a "back to the land " 
movement that represents a degree of reversal 
of the urban migration. People who used to be 
filled with pious horror at the thought of a man 
marrying his deceased wife's sister are reconsider- 

7 



8 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

ing the status of illegitimacy — in view of the 
presence of "war-babies" — and there has even 
been reported some talk, on the part of perfectly 
reputable people, of examining into the merits of 
plural marriage. Here is a catalogue, by no 
means exhaustive, of societal right-abouts. 

The salient feat performed by the French has 
consisted in divesting themselves of what used 
to be regarded as their traditional race-character. 
It is now demonstrated that they are as steady 
and enduring as the best. They are as far as 
possible from being a nation of frivolous, excit- 
able, quickly-tiring pleasure-lovers. Very likely 
the former accounts of them did them injustice, 
but there can be no doubt now that their national 
life runs more seriously and strongly within 
more secure channels than it has done before. 
And such a basic change draws a far-flung; se- 
quence of institutional modifications in its wake. 
Further, French life and societal structure are 
being much altered by the presence in France of 
representatives of almost all the nations of the 
earth, many of whom, we are told, mean to remain. 
Some fear that the very national identity of 
France lies in the balance. 

The name Russia summons up a scene of 
institutional upheaval and transformation. The 



UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES TO SOCIETY 9 

outstanding fact is the passing of the Little Father 
and the emergence of a new set of national figures, 
pursuing new methods under novel and even 
weird compulsions. Mother Vodka is banished as 
Mother Breshkovskaya returns. The mujik has 
been torn out of his isolation, where the dunghill 
before the hut has been the most prominent feature 
on the horizon of a sordid life, and has been not 
only smartly uniformed and drilled to stand erect, 
but also transported to unknown countries and 
his eyes perforce opened to- unfamiliar things. 
His head has been filled also with undigested 
economic and social theory, and has reacted upon 
this pabulum in fantastic and unedifying ways. 
But it is clear that he will never again be what he 
was or settle down contentedly to the old life. 
Russia may be an incalculable variable for some 
time to come ; but the limit it approaches can 
never be that status ante bellum. For the deeps 
have been stirred. 

If the French have divested themselves of their 
traditional race-character, the Germans have done 
no less. I do not need to go into the repulsive 
tale ; it is enough to say that the manifestations 
of German manners and morals were received by 
the world with utter incredulity until the evidence 
became irresistible. It is a question sometimes 



10 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

debated whether this barbarity was or was not in 
the national make-up ; whether there was any 
real change here or merely a revelation. It looks 
as if Germany was so ready for predatory war that 
not much adjustment to its conditions was neces- 
sary. It is all a question of whether the people 
have been with their rulers or not ; and the con- 
sideration of that question must be postponed 
for the moment. There have been recurrences 
of unrest in Germany, followed by ostensible 
yieldings and cajolery on the part of the govern- 
ment ; but opinion as to what is really occurring, 
or about to occur, must remain, in the absence of 
trustworthy evidence, largely inferential, or based 
upon general considerations. 

And we know as little about what is happening 
in Germany's vassal states, except that, whatever 
it is, it is directed or countenanced from Berlin. 
There are indications that sections of the Alliance 
are somewhat restive under an inexorable control 
that holds them from making adjustments which 
they are not loath to contemplate. Not Turkey 
— for she has no qualms in remaining what she 
is and has been — but the Dual Empire, and 
even Bulgaria, give signs of concern over the 
state in which they find themselves ; and neither 
the one nor the other seems entirely willing to 



UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES TO SOCIETY 11 

embrace all the methods of their unscrupulous 
pace-setter. Only Turkey finds herself in sym- 
pathetic harmony with her own type of theory 
and practice. 

Of all the societal changes consequent on the 
war none are more astonishing, though some are 
more dramatic, than those which have occurred in 
the United States. It is evident that our former 
"beneficent isolation" belongs to history. It 
suffered inroads as a consequence of the Spanish 
War and the brief imperialistic fever ; and 
subsequent improvements in annihilation of dis- 
tance had left it but a shell. Industrialism under 
isolation has ceased, for us, to represent adjust- 
ment to our national life-conditions. This the 
war has revealed. And now we have swung far 
toward militancy, if not toward militarism.^ A 
few years ago a military and naval budget of a 
few hundred millions was considered scandalously 
high, and, indeed, inconsonant with the spirit of 
American institutions ; twenty, or even ten years 
ago, the man who proposed conscription might as 
well have suggested having a king. And now we 
approve almost unanimously a budget of billions 
and compulsory service — if the votes of Congress, 
the sentiment of the press, the general acquiescence 

^ For the distinction here made between the two terms, see p. 126. 



12 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

and even enthusiastic support of the people, and 
the spirit of the national army may form a basis for 
judgment. There can be no question about our so- 
called industrialism having experienced a shrewd 
and rugged wrench in the direction of militancy. 
In the face of a menace and a need, our society 
has stirred uneasily, groped about after relief, 
pawed over the traditional expedients, and finally 
settled down upon the most drastic of them. 

Delegation of power to the executive has sur- 
passed anything the country has ever seen before ; 
and an era of control over industries and of price- 
fixing has set in that reminds one in turn of the 
Middle Ages and of socialistic Utopias. To a few 
men have been committed inquisitorial powers 
which would have been impossible of delegation a 
few years, or even months, ago. And among 
the startling innovations comes the movement 
toward economy ; Cassandras who have bewailed 
our wastefulness now stand aghast and fall back- 
ward before the sudden realization of their wildest 
dreams. For there is a goodly nucleus of citizens 
who are making a business of saving and who are 
seizing the opportunity to edge the masses over 
in that direction. There is also a large, though 
indeterminate body of our fellow-citizens, male 
and female, who are doing something which bears 



UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES TO SOCIETY 13 

at least an appearance of usefulness — knitting in 
the first row of the balcony, for example — instead 
of employing their time and strength in exclusively 
non-productive or wasteful activities. We do not 
now hear so much of bridge and the fox-trot. 

Again, a revision of policy in regard to immigra- 
tion, and in particular of the attitude toward the 
foreign-born, is indicated. Doubts as to the un- 
limited efficiency of the "melting-pot" have been 
voiced ere now ; but the revelation that some of 
our accessions to population — and those not the 
most recent, either — still harbor a feeling toward 
the fatherland that is somewhat warmer and more 
palpable and practical than sentimental reminis- 
cence, has come as a great shock to every patriot. 
As a measure of common caution, a revision of 
easy-going and trustful methods, and of careless 
optimism, is demanded. Foreign languages in 
schools, foreign news-sheets, and foreign asso- 
ciations designed to keep up home-ties, not to 
mention more sinister purposes, are now at a 
discount. The advocates of restriction of immi- 
gration have been given a considerable lift. 

Not to prolong this list, but one additional 
alteration of societal policy will be noted. It was 
a statesman's insight that saw in the Mexican 
difficulty a chance to strengthen our ties with 



14 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

South America; but the war has infused an ele- 
ment of fellowship that has not existed before. 
Common danger and common resentment have 
fostered sentiments that are replacing the former 
uninformed indifference or even impatient dis- 
esteem on our part, and the resentful mortification 
and suspicion on the other side, with a mutual 
toleration, understanding, and appreciation that 
promise much to the interest of both parties. 

This catalogue of societal changes during the 
war-period is not complete — something un- 
foreseen is happening to organized forms of 
religion, for example — but it is probably not 
far from representative. With this type of 
event in mind, we now go on to inquire to what 
extent the reasoned purposefulness of the in- 
dividual was responsible for its appearance. 



III. AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 

Had the war not occurred, most of the societal 
changes just cited, and many another that the 
reader can call to mind, would not have taken 
place now, or perhaps at all. Very likely the 
Russian revolution was due in the near future; 
but the American swing towards militancy was 
not. In all cases the war-conditions were the pre- 
cipitating agency. Much in the way of societal 
structure has been awaiting selection, or has been 
involved in the process, that would not have 
attained to a speedy verdict but for the war, 
with its general dislocations, revelations, and 
readjustments. But it is evident that the war 
was not started for the realization of any such pur- 
poses. The Germans did not set out to get the 
vote for British women nor yet to enforce economy 
in this country ; not even the British or the 
Americans had either of these ends in view in 
entering the conflict. Germany, in fact, did not 
want either England or the United States to 
participate ; she planned to have them both go 
15 



16 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

their unsuspecting, careless, and decadent way 
until she got ready for them. There was no pur- 
pose in the minds of any foreigners, for example, 
that we should adopt conscription — it is cer- 
tainly no vindication of reasoned purposefulness 
when the actual results come to the purposers as 
a surprise, involving disappointment and even 
consternation. 

The societal changes in the several countries 
developed automatically and impersonally in so 
far as the originators of the conflict were con- 
cerned. The state of war drew in its train a set 
of consequences ; situations appeared, for the 
most part unplanned and unforeseen, to which the 
several societies secured adjustment by their 
respective alterations of policy. Let us look first 
into the process of adjustment to these situations 
consequent upon war, to see whether it should 
be called automatic or referred to the reason and 
purpose of the individual ; then we can go back 
and inquire whether the state of war itself was 
brought about by automatically acting, impersonal 
forces or by those same faculties of the individual. 

Broadly speaking, all adjustment of society to 
its life-conditions is enforced by the pain of 
maladjustment, or the prospect of such pain, as 
sensed by numbers of individuals ; and it is 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 17 

secured when numbers have concurred in a course 
of action that brings relief. But it is inadmissible 
to credit that action to individual reason and 
purpose unless a great majority, at least, of the 
society members have really taken in the broad 
situation confronting the society and have de- 
liberately chosen the expedient that was adopted. 
This very rarely occurs unless the situation is 
exceptionally easy of visualization ; and an inter- 
national situation — generally foreseen by but 
few — is seldom, if ever, that. It is hardly fair 
to give credit to individual reason and purpose 
if only a few have really visualized the situation, 
and the rest have gone as the few wanted to go, 
under a variety of irrelevant motives. But we 
hasten to concrete illustration. 

In England one of the aspects of the situation 
following on war was a growing disproportion 
between the sexes. In the face of the traditional 
division of labor by sex — into man's work and 
woman's work — this meant a depletion of the 
male labor-supply, and a depletion coincident 
with an increasing demand for labor. Adjustment 
was possible only by the elimination, or at least 
suspension, of the time-honored tradition. There 
was, however, no general comprehension of the 
scope of such a change; there was action, first 



18 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

of all, on the part of the women. This action was 
unreflecting as respects the broad societal issue 
and was taken in response to a variety of stimuli, 
irrelevant to the broad situation. Numbers of 
women, in concerted response to the need and to 
the opening opportunity, entered to fill the partial 
vacuum, much as cooler air-currents "naturally" 
flow toward a cyclonic center. These women 
followed their interests as they felt them : 
economic necessity, impatience with idleness, the 
desire to do as others were doing, loneliness, 
loyalty, fear of the enemy — all these and doubt- 
less many another motive moved the individual. 
The situation facing the nation was visualized, 
doubtless, by a few ; and many went in on the 
basis of general patriotism — of which, as a 
reasoned motive, more later on. What is some- 
times called the "elite" may have figured out the 
consequences. Probably not more than one in a 
thousand entered an ammunition-plant or de- 
livered mail in order to get the vote for women ; 
yet the furthering of the suffrage cause was one 
of the things that came of it. It was in good part 
the demonstration by women of their industrial 
efficiency, as well as of their patriotism, that dis- 
posed the opposition to a change of heart. It had 
been the enforced idleness of hand and brain, as 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 19 

well as the emptiness of arms, that had goaded 
many women to an offensively restless activity; 
but now, in the face of the opening opportunities, 
even the militants, who had been pouring acid 
into mail-boxes and assaulting premiers, dropped 
their special purposes for the time and went to 
work — later to find their desires moving toward 
realization by way of a course of indirection fore- 
seen by few. The fact that married as well as 
single women are taking their places beside men 
as income-earners for life threatens even man's 
headship of the family, as well as his monopoly 
of the franchise. 

In cases like this (including those cited in the 
preceding chapter) there is a predominant element 
of unreasoned or even unwitting contribution to 
the big result. People act on impulses of various 
description ; upon sentiments that are diffuse, 
customary, or habitual rather than rational and 
discriminating. It is usually the immediate 
personal interest only — generally an economic 
one — that is pursued with a genuinely rational 
and purposeful motive. Loyalty and patriotism 
as motives, however creditable to the individual, 
as well as efficient and wholesome for the nation, 
are not usually rational. It is necessary to be 
very clear here on the distinction between that 



20 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

which we know to be the product of reason and that 
which looks, at first sight, as if it must have been. 
An expedient that "works" always impresses 
the partially informed as necessarily due to the 
planful action of some person — man or god. The 
camel's foot looks as if it had been skilfully planned 
for desert use ; the more exact our mathematics, 
says Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee," the 
nearer do we come to the formula of cell-construc- 
tion practiced in the hive. But there is no ques- 
tion here of anything but the unplanned and 
automatic. When natural selection is done, the 
product is always "rational" ; science has always 
stumbled along after such facts. The nature- 
process issues in that which will stand to reason. 
But now the "social process" also can show the 
same sort of issue. The savages often practice 
what is in effect a quarantine on the house of 
death ; they apply heat to a lame muscle to expel 
pain ; they proscribe close in-marriage. But that 
any such regulations have adequate reasoning 
and purpose behind them few would be found to 
maintain. We cannot any longer accept the 
ghost-theory that fathered them. Such action 
can be adjudged rational only if observed in 
retrospect and in ignorance of its antecedents. 
So seen, there is a strong suggestion of reason; 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 21 

but the reason is after the act, and is put in by the 
more sophisticated observer. It is clear, then, 
that the customary or habitual may show the 
same sort of rationahty as the "natural," and 
reveal results that reason would be proud to be 
credited with, and sometimes tries to appropri- 
ate. 

The occasion for drawing this distinction was 
the remark that loyalty and patriotism are not 
usually rational. They are matters of feeling 
and habit. They lie in custom. But the ex- 
pediency of many such social usages is so evi- 
dent, that is, they work so well, that they are 
credited to reason. In reality they have survived 
selection just as the nature-products have ; only 
the selection is on the plane of societal, not organic 
evolution. It could be shown that patriotism, 
and even jingoism, are sentiments that serve a 
society well, and have thus had a high survival- 
value in the course of its evolution. But it 
should now be clear that it will not do to consider 
an adjustment made by society to be the result of 
individual purposeful reasoning because of the 
patriotism behind it. If so, there is nothing to 
show that the condition created by the dispro- 
portion of the sexes in England, a consequence of 
the war, evoked, in the form of a far-reaching 



22 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

societal change, a reasoned and purposeful response 
on the part of individuals. 

It is difficult to descry much response of the 
rational order, or much even that might be mis- 
taken for such, in the Russian doings. The 
impression here is as of behemoth lurching un- 
easily about and making uncertain starts, now 
this way and now that, under the stress of unde- 
fined, ill-defined, and fleeting impulses — a vision 
of the crudely automatic. If adjustment comes 
about eventually, it will be through the lumbering 
and costly process of trial and failure, and that 
irrespective of whether or not a glittering mahout 
rides on the monster's head as it finally plods 
into some course of adequate adjustment. All 
varieties of unreasoned and irrational cross- 
purpose are here having their day. 

In the United States a better informed people 
stands a more hopeful chance of thinking a new 
situation out and acting purposefully in the light 
of reflection. Take the movement looking to 
economy in living. Saving in the face of want is 
a pretty obvious expedient, and also it has to do 
with concrete and tangible things. It does not 
demand great intellectual tension; even the 
savage does it. In this country, ease in the dis- 
semination of programs of saving, and of the 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 23 

simple considerations back of them, further aids 
the application of reason-directed purpose. It is 
apparently a hard case for alignment imder the 
automatic category. It is not denied that the 
controllers of food, coal, and other indispensables 
will be able, by their propaganda, to enlist the 
rational support of millions. However, even 
here, the presence of the impersonal and automatic 
can be made out clearly enough. Many will 
save, not because they sense the peculiar reasons 
for so doing, but because they will automatically 
cease to consume the scarce and high-priced 
articles. And there are many who will never 
accept the reasonableness of economy-programs, 
but, whatever they do — evade or obey — it will 
be done unintelligently. Reason will be enlisted 
by others, but only to support self-indulgence and 
selfishness. Such unintelligent docility or un- 
willing acquiescence are far from being reasoned 
purposefulness in the face of a recognized societal 
issue. Even those individuals who economize 
"for the country," and do not go behind the 
phrase, afford no evidence for the theorist who 
insists that societal adjustment is by way of the 
intelligent, purposeful action of individuals in 
the face of visualized and understood conditions. 
The automatic element is more marked as the 



24 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

case is less concrete and immediate. There are 
many persons in this enlightened land of op- 
portunity who have not the imagination to 
visualize anything but the most concrete and 
inmiediate. Their spheres of comprehension are 
narrowly circumscribed, and outside are merely 
ambiguous forms and fantastic hopes and fears. 
Often, however, they will take leading readily 
enough, especially if they are vaguely frightened, 
and if the leading does not impose too great a 
sacrifice of immediate interests. They are not 
moved by any theoretical or "academic" con- 
siderations and are not critical where their feelings 
are enlisted. What they need to move them is 
suggestion, applied and re-applied. Here is the 
hope of the propagandist. 

"Too dark and pessimistic a picture," some one 
objects. Perhaps so ; but it must be realized that 
if the theory of reasoned, purposeful, individual 
action as the agency of society's adjustment is 
to be maintained, it must cover not only the 
"classes," but the "masses." The latter form 
the bulk of any society, and if it is to be moved, 
they must be moved. These are the people many 
of whom crave the yellow journal and are un- 
critical of its sensational appeal to the feelings and 
prejudices. Here are those who cannot be shown 



AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENTS 25 

a fact so obvious as that the potato, however 
scarce and costly, is not the sole food appropriate 
for a laborer. There are those among us who 
live in an adherence to tradition about as in- 
telligent as that of any primitive tribe. There 
are as few of this class in this country as in any 
other, but they cannot fairly be ignored. They 
cannot be rightly included under a sweeping 
theory of societal adaptation as performed by the 
intelligent and purposeful response of individuals. 
Nor, on the other hand, should a theory of 
automatic adaptation be so sweeping as to take 
no account of the relatively few thinkers. I am 
interested here in exhibiting the presence of the 
ignored automatic element rather than in claiming 
everything for it. It is commonly lost to calcu- 
lation, but it ought not to be, for it is the basic 
element. It dominates even when there are 
purposeful reasoners in seats of power, for the 
reasoners cannot go ahead without reference to 
public opinion. Facing a situation as we do, 
where economy is plainly called for, many 
respond intelligently and at once ; it may even 
be that such persons can, in effect, respond 
vicariously for the rest. But if they do that, 
forcing or cajoling the rest into acting as the 
intelligent think best, then society's adjustment 



26 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

is not, in any reasonable interpretation of the 
case, one referable to the intellect and purpose 
of its constituent individuals. But, with this 
turn of the discussion toward the matter of 
leadership, we are drawn into considerations of a 
still more general order. 



IV. A PEOPLE'S WAR 

There is thus much reason to suppose that the 
several changes in societal arrangements and 
habitudes, effected in this and that society in 
adjustment to war-conditions, are typically auto- 
matic in their development. It is clear enough 
that most of these war-conditions, sex-dispropor- 
tion, for instance, were and are inevitable, repre- 
senting as they do a set of sequences set afloat 
automatically by the presence of war. It remains 
to inquire whether the war itself came about auto- 
matically or as the result of the reasoned purpose 
of individuals. And it should be noted pre- 
liminarily that any war becomes straightway a 
"people's war" if it becomes big enough and near 
enough to cause the people to believe, or to be 
persuaded, that the native land is threatened. 
Then they will rally to self-defense, inspired by 
feelings of patriotism, and can readily be shown, 
among other things, that a strong offensive is the 
best defense. 

27 



28 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

This would seem to indicate that any group of 
men in power, or even any one man, can at any 
time precipitate a war, and a popular one, by 
stirring up a hornet's nest and then falling back 
upon the people. Doubtless this has been done ; 
Bismarck was an adept at this sort of maneuver. 
But the question immediately rises as to why 
leaders of this ilk are in power, and why they 
are kept in power. Their type does, or does not, 
represent the national will. If it does — if Germans 
are sure to be represented by this type of trouble- 
hunter — then the society must assume responsi- 
bility, the eminent individual dropping out except 
as an agent of the popular will. If it does not, 
then the inference is that this nation cannot or 
will not make its will felt as against its rulers, 
either because it has no will or because extraor- 
dinary obstacles interpose to thwart expression : 
the people are pathetically uninformed, perhaps, 
or misinformed, or hopelessly prepossessed, or so 
docile and suggestible as to deserve the epithet 
"political imbecile." There is some evidence to 
support any one of these hypotheses ; a later 
chapter will be devoted to the special form of 
obsession to which the German people seem pecul- 
iarly susceptible. 

It is a matter of comparatively small con- 



A PEOPLE'S WAR 29 

sequence, seen in long perspective, that war 
eventuated in one year rather than another, or 
under one Emperor rather than another; the 
disharmony was sure to come to a head sooner or 
later, for it is a case of incompatibility between 
societal systems, each represented by the sort of 
spokesmen characteristic of it. The war came 
about as the result of the action of impersonal, 
automatically operative social forces on the order 
of the impersonal, automatically acting natural 
forces ; the antics of a ruler giddy with self- 
importance could have been played only on a 
stage set for him. The sun was coming up any- 
how, whether Chanticleer crowed or not. 

Doubtless the despot of an unresisting, inartic- 
ulate sheep-people or Viehvolk could render a 
striking exhibition of purposeful action by the 
individual as the moving force in societal evolu- 
tion. But this is hardly the sort of evidence to 
thrill the soul of the theorist whose pet views 
it seems to support; it looks atavistic or deca- 
dent. No one could contemplate, with proprie- 
tary pride, as grist available for his theory-mill, 
the spectacle of millions being led about by the 
national nose, even when that organ is clutched 
between the knuckles of no less a personage than 
the high priest of Odinism. There have been too 



30 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

few cases of the sort in the present or the past to 
justify the conviction that such an one is normal, 
not pathological, if indeed it exists at all. And the 
German case is not yet closed ; if there has been 
an incredible success in keeping a whole people 
uninformed, or misinformed, or under illusion, the 
misled may yet encounter a situation full of pain 
and disillusion that is calculated to spoil the com- 
pleteness and perfection of the case for autocracy. 
The Kaiser may come to point the old Greek 
saying : Call no man happy till he is dead. 
It is a pretty far-gone imbecile that will not lash 
out if there is sufficient stimulus. 

As a matter of fact, the German people ac- 
quiesce in, where they do not heartily support, 
the programs of their Tulers. If they did not, 
these programs could not be realized or even 
formulated. However the national sentiment is 
formed or guided, the lords of affairs are power- 
less except as they are tolerated or supported by 
it. The purposeful action of the individual, 
however exalted he may be, is no more than a 
variation on the theme set by the public opinion 
of the society. Even assuming that the Kaiser 
precipitated the present war in order to harmo- 
nize elements with which he had been having diffi- 
culty, and to justify the burdensome increase 



A PEOPLE'S WAR 31 

of armament, he could not have done this in an- 
other society. If the Kaiser and his circle could, 
by some miracle, be transferred into the execu- 
tive offices at Washington, they would be power- 
less to make programs and create situations 
fraught with gratuitous menace to other peoples. 
And they would not hold office long. It is foolish 
to lay all this world-coil to individuals. To do 
so is to deal in mythology and adhere to magic. 
It is like believing that old women produce 
tempests by pulling off their stockings. 

For there has never been a despot so securely 
settled on the throne and surrounded by so power- 
ful an entourage, that he could not be shaken 
down by the popular will if he crossed it often 
or flagrantly enough. In the modern world most 
kings are mere figure-heads, and, like Edward 
VII, attain to personal influence and power only 
when they are popular. The old method of 
unseating the unpopular ruler, by revolution, 
is present even in our own day; but elections 
and other forms of "peaceful revolution" have 
also been devised to keep the real rulers — 
prime ministers and presidents — under regular 
control by the popular will. The whole course 
of society's evolution has been marked by in- 
creasingly efficient adjustments permitting of the 



32 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

more unrestricted expression of that will. If the 
German people are in a position of impotence 
in this matter, the case is an exception that must 
have some special and vagrant course of develop- 
ment behind it. It is in accord with what we 
know of the operation of societal evolution, 
throughout human history, to believe, in the 
absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, 
that Germany's rulers are expressing German 
public opinion, either present or recent, and 
that if they were not there to voice it, other 
channels of outlet would have been opened. 

I say that acquaintance with the operation of 
societal evolution leads to this conclusion. I 
might have said that plain common sense points 
to such a conviction. But there are many things 
that are said to "stand to reason" which will not 
stand to scientific examination ; in fact, the 
phrase "it stands to reason" is often employed 
as a sort of camouflage to conceal some "intui- 
tion" or some belief that is harbored merely 
because we want to believe it. Here is a place 
for the application of "trained and organized 
common sense," which was Huxley's definition 
of science. I shall now try to indicate the con- 
ception of societal evolution that goes with the 
belief in the predominance of the impersonal, 



A PEOPLE'S WAR 33 

spontaneous, and automatic in the life of society, 
and to "place" in this evolutionary process the 
vast episode now being enacted with the whole 
world as a stage. 

From now on we shall confine attention, to the 
virtual disregard of the individual and his quali- 
ties and powers, upon societies. We have taken 
some little account of the trees, and now propose, 
without denying their indispensability as com- 
ponents, to view the woods. We shall deal in 
terms of a wider intention. For if, extending 
the perspective, we look over and beyond the 
individual, we see in this world-conflict the align- 
ment and confrontation of great societies — 
somewhat as Homer saw the vast forms of the 
higher powers seated unmoved above the fight- 
ing and dying mortals, or going about their pro- 
digious affairs, or engaging in immortal combat. 
The movements of these societies, so viewed, 
are impersonal and automatic after the manner 
of gravitation or osmosis, and the individual is 
lost to sight, or, rather, to identification, as he 
blends into the composite mass. It is from such 
a plane that we shall now view the conflict. 
Thus seen, it appears as a powerful selective 
factor in the evolution, not alone of the several 
nations, but of human society itself. Here is 



34 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

a vast laboratory of selection of the superorganic 
order — the greatest laboratory the social scien- 
tist has ever seen or heard of ; for what is going 
on before his face is the most gigantic exhibition 
of that type of selection that the world has ever 
experienced. Now is his chance to get glimpses 
of the mass-motions that form the driving ener- 
gies of the tremendous process. 

A view of such matters in the large cannot be 
gained, however, without first giving some thought 
to the factors and processes of societal evolution 
in general. These should be capable, for the 
most part, of simple and untechnical descrip- 
tion. In any case the next item in my program 
is to attempt such an exposition.^ 

1 For a condensed statement of the author's views, of a more 
technical order and wider scope, see Keller, " Societal Evolution." 



V. FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 
OF CONDUCT 

The central figure in societal evolution is, as 
we shall view it, a human society. This is a 
group of human beings living in a cooperative 
effort to win subsistence and to perpetuate the 
species. Such a definition proposes for society 
the same functions that are familiar throughout 
the organic world : self-maintenance and self- 
perpetuation. The latter of these functions is 
a sort of extension, in time, of the former ; society, 
like an animal species, could exist awhile — for 
a generation — without it. But self-maintenance 
is fundamental and primordial ; it had to begin 
at once, and if there is going to be any species or 
society at all, it can never stop. In order not to 
complicate matters, let us fix attention, at least 
for the moment, upon this basic matter of society's 
self -maintenance . 

Self-maintenance means primarily and uni- 
versally the food-quest; but it involves also, 
for most men, the provision for protection against 

35 



36 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the natural environment : clothing and other 
shelter. This item of protection, when secured, 
represents success in the struggle for existence 
as pursued against the inanimate part of the 
environment ; and so there is another aspect of 
that struggle, when it is carried on against the 
animate part, namely, the competition of life. 
This is a contest against plant, animal, and fellow- 
man to attain or to retain that which makes 
existence possible, or to preserve life itself. Two 
main phases of the struggle thus reveal them- 
selves, namely, industry and war for plunder. 
In the former the means of living are derived 
from the inanimate or animate environment — 
by hunting and, later on, by herding and agricul- 
ture ; in the latter, by the appropriation of the 
product of the industry of others, or aggression. 
Always industry is the basic maintenance ac- 
tivity. 

But the development of activities in self-main- 
tenance is not a haphazard, discontinuous pro- 
cess. When the first societies of which we know 
appear to view, they are already provided with 
a set of ways, or a traditional procedure, by which 
they carry on this activity, and every other of 
their activities as well. These ways represent 
a concurrence of group-members in the practice 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 37 

of expedients which have been proved to them, 
in the event, to be successful ones. These ex- 
pedient ways have been called the folkways or 
mores. Language is one of the most typical 
of the mores ; division of labor is another. No 
one planned them, but they grew up and are 
practiced unquestioningly, unconsciously, and 
automatically. They correspond to habits in 
the individual. Taken all together, they con- 
stitute the code of behavior of the society. They 
represent the proper way to act, and, although 
they are not subjected to any rational or critical 
examination, there exists the conviction that 
they are the only right ways, the only ones fit 
to live by. The mores, says Sumner,^ who first 
analyzed them, "are the popular habitudes and 
traditions, when they contain a judgment that 
they are conducive to societal welfare, and when 
they exert a coercion upon the individual to 
conform to them, although they are not coordi- 
nated by any authority." It is just as well to 
have a technical term for them, for they are not 
precisely customs, or social habitudes, or ethics, 
or morals. 

They become uniform and universal in a group, 

* In " Folkways, A Study of the Sociological Importan'^e of Usages, 
Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals." 



38 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

and also imperative ; and, often over long periods, 
they are invariable. Many of them are strongly 
sanctioned by religion ; in fact, practically all 
of them that are of long standing are supported 
by the readiness of the spirits, ancestral or other, 
to punish infringement or alteration. They thus 
come to form a prescribed body of rules of be- 
havior for life in society that well deserves the 
title of "the social code." 

I have already intimated that the mores extend 
beyond the range of self-maintenance. Within 
that range they determine how the struggle for 
existence and the competition of life shall go on, 
thus rising to meet and cope with certain vital 
and perennial- life-conditions. Another inescap- 
able and vital life-condition is laid down in the 
bisexuality of the human race ; there are the 
relations of the sexes to be ordered, in the interest 
of the society's well-being. Innumerable mores 
attend to the relations of man and woman, 
parents and children, and they work out into 
various forms of marriage and the family. A 
big group of mores always surrounds some vital 
condition of society life, like that of sex, and 
forms the approved method of dealing with it. 
Another such condition, for further example, 
was felt in the vividly conceived presence of a 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 39 

world of ghosts and spirits, an imaginary envi- 
ronment to which men adjusted themselves by 
the unplanned development of a set of mores 
covering forms of avoidance, exorcism, concilia- 
tion, and propitiation. 

But these several sets of mores, "mere custom" 
at first, gradually attained a stage of organiza- 
tion where they became institutions, as, for 
example, matrimony and religion. There is no 
human institution that has not risen from the 
matrix of custom, and the rise of new institutions, 
now as always, is out of the same prolific source. 
And, as they take more definite form and some- 
what disengage themselves from the mass of 
custom, the institutions do not lose, but carry 
with them, that approval and that conviction 
as to their indispensability for welfare that were 
accorded to the mores. iVny thing that is in our 
mores is right, and so our institutions are the best. 
"The mores," says Sumner again, "can make 
anything right and prevent condemnation of 
anything." They are the approved ways of 
meeting the conditions of living, developed, 
accepted, and practiced without the intervention 
of reasoned purpose. 

They are to a society what, for example, 
density and color of fur are to arctic animals ; 



40 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

namely automatic adaptations to environment. 
Life-conditions are present and society has to 
live under them. This is rendered possible, or 
easy, or easier, by adjustments in the manner of 
life or ways of living. Thus we have a societal 
code characteristic, for instance, of the arctics 
or of the tropics, of isolation or accessibility, 
of over-population or under-population, of the 
country or of the city, of peace or of war. 

Adaptation is the characteristic result of 
the process of organic evolution. It is also, 
though this is less commonly recognized, that of 
the process of societal evolution. It is never 
perfect ; and, since life-conditions are always 
changing, it is never stable. Maladjustment 
recurs, to be followed by new adjustment by 
way of altered mores and institutions. This re- 
curring adjustment is secured, in nature, through 
the operation of three factors : variation, selec- 
tion, and heredity, all of which act, of course, 
automatically. By variation, diversity is secured 
— the members of the new generation are not 
precisely like those of the old, nor are they all 
duplicates of one another. By heredity, on the 
other hand, a general likeness is retained as 
between parents and offspring, and as among the 
several offspring. Heredity is the conservative 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 41 

element. By selection the least adapted of any 
generation are weeded out, leaving the best 
adapted to survive. These latter are the "fittest." 

A similar process, arriving at the same result, 
namely, adjustment to life-conditions, takes place 
in the life of society. Variation produces di- 
versity in the mores and in the institutions crys- 
tallizing out of them ; tradition, corresponding 
to heredity in the organic world, holds the type 
of the mores, as they are passed along ; and 
selection weeds out the less expedient mores and 
institutions. The evolutionary process is, how- 
ever, on another plane than that of organic 
evolution, and in a different mode. Its exist- 
ence has been long recognized in an unconscious 
sort of way ; for writers on society's life have 
frequently spoken of "social heredity" or "social 
selection," just as generations of naturalists 
before Darwin spoke of "families" of plants or 
animals — not realizing that such terms were 
more than metaphorical, or better than anal- 
ogies. To make use of the point of view here 
taken, it is necessary to be resolved as to the 
nature of variation, selection, and transmission 
as factors in societal evolution. 

Variation in the mores represents a series of 
tentatives, departing more or less from the ac- 



42 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

cepted code, that are struck out upon by individ- 
uals in the pursuit of their interests. The in- 
dividual's function is that of an agency for 
variation. These slight departures from the 
code are in evidence all the time ; in fact, the 
societj'^'s code is a sort of average or mean or type, 
about which cluster the codes of classes, sects, 
and other larger and smaller sub-groups. The 
individual may adhere to a number of these 
sub-groups, as his interests dictate. He may be- 
long, for instance, to the carpenters' union, the 
Baptist church, the Socialist party, the Masonic 
lodge, at one and the same time. When interests 
change, other and new codes may appear, some 
of them departing widely in character, perhaps, 
from the general or typical code of the society 
at large. In general, the rise of such variations 
is a consequence of discomfort under the pre- 
vailing code ; interests strain toward a better 
realization by way of change, small or great. 

Such variations may be short-lived and ex- 
hibited by only a few, or there may be a con- 
currence of many which carries them forward 
until, perhaps, the code of the society at large 
has been profoundly modified. Some of the vari- 
ations live and some die out. Here is the fact 
of selection. All through history, codes and 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 43 

institutions have appeared, have persisted for 
a time, and have been altered or have passed 
completely away. Since the topic of selection, 
and in particular selection by war, is the main 
interest in this present discussion, I should prefer 
for the moment merely to record the fact of selec- 
tion, leaving the consideration of the process for 
special examination. 

Transmission of the mores is by tradition — 
which, I repeat, corresponds, in the societal 
realm, to heredity in the organic. Tradition, 
like heredity, tends to repeat the type. It is 
brought about through imitation, either spon- 
taneous or induced. Spontaneous imitation is 
a natural activity, common to animals and man, 
and especially marked, among human beings, 
in the young. The receiver of the mores, thus 
transmitted, wants to receive, and takes the 
initiative in the transfer, as when the small 
boy apes his father. But imitation is also capable 
of being induced, where there is no likelihood 
that it will be spontaneous, by precept and dis- 
cipline. This is education, in its broadest sense. 
The receiver may be indifferent or even unwilling 
to receive, and the giver commonly takes the 
initiative, as, for example, in the "upHfting" of 
a "lower" race. Also, while spontaneous imita- 



44 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tion carries all the mores indiscriminately, edu- 
cation carries a more or less wisely selected body 
of mores. It is clear that the former is the more 
natural, elemental, impersonal, spontaneous, and 
automatic process ; the latter is effective as it 
succeeds in reproducing the essentials, at least in 
appearance, of the former, but in comparison it 
appears artificial. It involves, it has been noted, 
an antecedent choice or selection from the main 
body of the mores : we will teach the young 
certain things and others we will try to keep from 
them as long as possible. This choice is supposed 
to be a reasoned and purposeful one ; but such a 
selection has little of the sureness and severe 
correctness of an automatic selection. 

These evolutionary factors are operative in 
the life of every society, from the family group 
to the nation. And they do not stop there. 
They are effective, on the grand scale, in the life 
of Human Society as a whole. There is a world- 
code that has been in the process of formation 
with the establishment of proximity between the 
nations ; for that proximity, brought about by 
the "annihilation of distance," has meant altered 
conditions of life for many societies ; and varia- 
tions that have been demonstrated, under selec- 
tion, to be expedient, have been transmitted 



FOLKWAYS AND SOCIETAL CODES 45 

until enough mores have come to be held in 
common by all, or nearly all, to justify the term 
"international code" or "world-code." Varia- 
tions around this code, or in departure from it, 
may now be originated by a whole nation, and 
submitted for world-wide acceptance or rejec- 
tion. Slavery, for example, has been rejected, 
while democracy has widened its range. And 
of late stands forth Germany, as champion of 
a code that is even now undergoing the ordeal 
of selection. These national variations on the 
world-code cannot be tested up as soon as, or 
shortly after they appear — as Mormonism was 
tested up on the American national code — and 
the process of selection is the more imposing 
when it comes. We turn now to a survey of the 
essentials of the selective process. 



VI. CONFLICT AN ESSENTIAL TO SELEC- 
TION : PEACEFUL COMPETITION 

The idea of the variation and transmission of 
a societal code is readily grasped, though it should 
not be thought that these factors work out in a 
simple and obvious manner. But there is more 
difficulty with selection. The term itself causes 
some trouble, for there is about it a connotation of 
choosing which darkens counsel. In organic 
evolution there cannot be, of course, any ques- 
tion of choice ; the results of natural selection 
are attained by elimination of the maladapted, 
not by any positive process. The "fit" are those 
that are left after the rest have been disposed of. 
The whole process is impersonal and automatic, 
in its entirety. Similarly with the most im- 
portant manifestations of societal selection, if 
not with them all. In any case, it is necessary 
to start out with the idea of selection by way of 
elimination rather than with the misleading 
positive conception of selection as picking and 
choosing. Variations around the code appear 

46 



PEACEFUL COMPETITION 47 

and come to the test. Those that cannot qualify 
as expedient adjustments tend to pass away, 
and the rest remain because nothing is done to 
them. The "fit" variations in the mores, Hke 
the fit organisms, are let alone to run their course. 
Thus the term " selection," as used in evolutionary 
systems, has a special sense and must be so under- 
stood. 

Essential to the operation of selection is con- 
flict. Conflict involves competition, and with- 
out it there is no test. Thus natural selection 
could not take place were it not for the struggle 
for existence out of which the better adapted 
forms emerge as the rest perish. Highly devel- 
oped specimens of organic life do not appear 
under isolation, but under conditions of com- 
petition — not in Australia, for example, but 
in Asia. This situation is duplicated in the 
societal realm, for no isolated people ever de- 
veloped an advanced code, that is, a high civili- 
zation. Compare Mesopotamian culture, for 
instance, with that of Tierra del Fuego. But 
where numbers of human beings come into con- 
tact, a competitive conflict is bound to occur; 
for all are trying to satisfy wants, and the satis- 
factions are too few to go round. Also it is 
characteristic of wants that they increase with the 



48 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

satisfaction of them ; if at one instant of time all 
human wants were satisfied, the next instant 
would reveal many more emerging, that could 
not be met. So that, in the pursuit of their 
interests, both individuals and societies are sure 
to fall into conflict. It is this conflict that 
brings codes of conduct and policies of living to a 
test and a selection. 

But the mores and codes cannot fight one 
another. If we speak of the conflict of mili- 
tarism and industrialism, we are using a figure 
of speech. The conflict is not between codes or 
institutions, but between the societies adhering 
to them. If the battle goes to the bearers of a 
certain code, that code is extended and strength- 
ened in influence ; if against them, it is weakened 
and may be eliminated altogether. It is the 
issue of the conflict that is decisive. 

The conflict is of various types : military, 
industrial, commercial, political ; but it is always 
a struggle to realize interests. What is wanted 
is the power to get rights to something, such as 
the franchise, a "place in the sun," and so on. 
We have a right to a thing when the rest will 
hold off and let us have it; but they will not 
hold off unless they are under some compulsion 
to do so. The power — military, civil, moral. 



PEACEFUL COMPETITION 49 

or other — established as the result of struggle, 
is that compulsion. What people want above all, 
barring only existence itself, is the right to realize 
a standard of living. This is a matter of detail- 
enterprise, but for a society it amounts to a slight 
or a considerable idealization upon the living 
its members are used to ; it comes to involve 
an extension of the local code, with certain re- 
finements upon it. But such an objective readily 
brings two classes in the same nation or two 
nations into conflict over their codes, for in- 
stance over autocracy as against democracy. 
Thus the codes themselves furnish a casus belli. 
They are the more likely to do that because, in 
the conviction that "our" ways are the only 
right ones, we are wont to regard those of others 
as ridiculous, perverse, altogether wrong, or even 
contemptible. This sentiment of group-egotism 
is called ethnocentrism. 

It is plain, without going for the present into 
greater detail, that there are always occasions 
enough for conflict between societies. Now the 
crudest form of such conflict is common to both 
animals and men ; it is by physical violence. 
This form is the one specifically before us, and 
must be looked into with some care ; I should 
like to set it aside with that purpose in view 



50 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

while surveying first the milder forms of human 
conflict. There is some advantage in consider- 
ing the more evolved forms first, when we are 
studying a case of recurrence of the less evolved. 
This is, in effect, putting the cart before the 
horse, so far as evolutionary sequence goes ; for 
all other types of competition are, at least among 
civilized peoples, modifications of an antecedent 
violence. They have been, in their time, varia- 
tions on the code of violent conflict, and they 
have been subjected to selection. The fact that 
they have survived that test indicates that they 
are more expedient as adjustments to evolved 
life-conditions of societies than is their parent 
stock. But it should be noted that no evolu- 
tionary adjustments are permanent ; their per- 
sistence under given conditions proves nothing 
about their expediency should conditions change 
— change back, for instance, to resemble more 
primitive ones. For while softened conditions 
can be met by gentler expedients, a recurrence 
of harsh conditions calls for a return to rough 
and crude forms of adjustment. 

In considering the milder forms of conflict 
we are led at once before a broad adjustment 
which is a pre-condition to their development. 
This is the "peace-group," otherwise called the 



PEACEFUL COMPETITION 51 

"in-group" or the "we-group." A peace-group 
is composed of members who have enough in- 
terests in common to allow of cooperation rather 
than conflict in their realization. They have a 
common code — common, that is, in the essen- 
tials ; there is no conflict over the vital things, 
for they are assumed in the common code, and 
disputes over minor matters can be carried on, 
generally, without breach of the peace by recourse 
to violence. "Men will always fight," it is 
said, "when they are mad enough"; but in this 
case the matters concerning which they could get 
mad enough are agreed upon by all fellow-mem- 
bers, so that they do not have to be fought about 
within the group ; and over the issues of less 
weight, passion does not run so high. 

No one ever set out to invent a peace-group. 
It is a typically spontaneous, automatic, and 
impersonal development, and one with a very 
high survival value; for it is by peace and order 
within that a society is enabled to resist de- 
struction or to concentrate its strength in the 
pursuit of its interests against competitors. In 
fact, the very definition of a human society, as 
given above, implies internal peace as an indis- 
pensable condition. Thus the peace-group may 
be taken to be as old as humanity, and even 



52 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

older, for animals form true societies. But it 
appears in history as a modification of an ante- 
cedent regime of violence. What we actually 
see in history is a progressive development of 
restriction on violence, both as between individ- 
uals and classes within the same society, and 
also as between societies. But the very prohibi- 
tion of violence witnesses to the priority of 
violence. The general tendency, where we know 
war to have been the mode, has been in the 
direction of milder methods ; there is no general 
or steady tendency in the opposite direction ; 
and so the conflict by violence appears to be a 
heritage from the antique world. War is often 
spoken of as a reversion. Nations, even when 
at war, take pains to cast the odium of recourse 
to such a savage expedient upon the enemy. 
Public opinion is against violence and in favor 
of peace — but that it was not always so, can be 
gathered from the character of the heroes and 
divinities of olden time. Whether or not the 
primordial era was one of unmitigated violence, 
the extension of the peace-group, as seen in his- 
tory, has represented a progressive modification 
of the ruder methods of conflict. 

The existence of a peace-group is dependent 
upon the adherence of its members to a common 



PEACEFUL COMPETITION 53 

societal code ; their major interests coincide and 
are being realized under the adjustments to life- 
conditions represented by the code. There is 
a conviction that group-welfare depends upon 
the code, and there arises a loyalty to it and a 
partisanship, that constitute patriotism. Such 
sentiments create cohesion and stability, and 
have, as we have seen, a high survival-value 
in any society's life. But this does not mean, 
we have already insisted, that the society's code 
remains forever the same. It is only the vital 
or salient mores that are held in common ; out- 
side of these is the inevitable variation, due to 
the non-uniform composition of the society. 
For every society or nation, however stable as 
a peace-group, includes classes, sects, and other 
constituents, each of which has, as its truly dis- 
tinguishing feature, its special body of mores. 
The most essential of these mores receive rep- 
resentation in the national code ; but there 
are minor interests enough to struggle for, in 
competition with other sub-groups. These com- 
peting fellow-groups are also divisible into still 
smaller constituents, with still more special 
interests and still more specialized rules of con- 
duct. There is endless chance for conflict, selec- 
tion, and adjustment within the peace-group. It 



54 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

is clear that as the different local bodies unite to 
form the larger ones, and as they all finally join to 
make up the society or nation, the number of mores 
common to the unions must become ever smaller 
and their form more general. The residue to which 
all peacefully adhere are the few and general es- 
sentials of the inclusive code ; the conflict is about 
minor matters and is pursued in a milder way. 

I do not wish to load these pages with abstrac- 
tions or generalities not bearing directly upon 
my main topic, nor yet with needless illustra- 
tion. The milder methods of social conflict do 
not form the main subject of this writing, and are 
to be treated only as they throw light upon war- 
selection. However, it must be understood that 
war-selection comes about, in these days, when 
the milder methods break down ; and it is there- 
fore necessary to summon up a quite clear and 
definite impression of how the milder methods 
have been evolved and what they can and can- 
not do, in order to see where war comes in. 

Perhaps the generalities of a code upon which a 
whole nation agrees, as distinguished from de- 
tails of lesser importance, may be best brought 
out by a quotation ^ — in which the emphasis 

1 Sumner, W. G., "The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays," 
pp. 353-354. 



PEACEFUL COMPETITION 55 

upon the impersonal and automatic in the forma- 
tion and acceptance of a national code should 
be noted. "The rights of conscience, the equality 
of all men before the law, the separation of church 
and state, religious toleration, freedom of speech 
and of the press, popular education, are vital 
traditions of the American people. They are not 
brought in question ; they form the stock of 
firm and universal convictions on which our 
national life is based ; they are ingrained into the 
character of our people, and you can assume, 
in any controversy, that an American will admit 
their truth. But they form the sum of traditions 
which we obtain as our birthright. They are 
never explicitly taught to us, but we assimilate 
them in our earliest childhood from all our sur- 
roundings, at the fireside, at school, from the 
press, on the highways and streets. We never 
hear them disputed and it is only when we ob- 
serve how diflScult it is for some foreign nations 
to learn them that we perceive that they are not 
implanted by nature in the human mind. They 
are a part and the most valuable part of our na- 
tional inheritance, and the obligation of love, 
labor, and protection which we owe to the nation 
rests upon these benefits which we receive from 
it. 



56 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

Agreeing with respect to these generaHties — 
accepting them, in fact, without reflection — Amer- 
icans experience in the rest of the national Hfe 
a series of colHsions of minor interests : some have 
wanted protectionism, others free trade ; some 
an imperiahstic poHcy, others the traditional 
policy of isolation, A long series of interests, 
lined up for the fray, could be mentioned : labor 
vs. capital, debtors vs. creditors, gold-standardists 
vs. inflationists, suffragists vs. anti-suffragists, 
"wets" vs. "drys"; and, on the smaller scale, 
religious sects, secret societies, and local organi- 
zations of all descriptions maintain an unremit- 
ting competition among themselves. Viewed from 
this angle, national life is a seething arena of 
conflict, industrial, commercial, political, reli- 
gious, moral, full of petty or more than petty 
triumphs and reverses, entailing extensions and 
eliminations of petty or more than petty codes 
of behavior. 

It remains to note that each smaller group is 
trying all the time to universalize its pet program, 
and that there is always the possibility that it 
may acquire a following sufficient to raise its 
code into a prominence from which it can chal- 
lenge some of the essentials of the national code. 
If, then, there comes about a conflict over es- 



PEACEFUL COMPETITION 57 

sentials, there is in prospect a selection that may 
demand revohition, probably violence, and so the 
suspension or even the destruction of the peace- 
status itself. Slavery in the South was for a 
long time a minor national issue ; but it rose 
into prominence, got in among the essentials, 
so that the nation could not exist half-slave and 
half-free, and was finally eliminated by recourse 
to war. If any local issue works up into such 
prominence, it transcends peaceful settlement. 
People have become, with the successive thwart- 
ing of interests believed by them to be essential, 
angry enough to fight; and as yet there is no 
peaceful device that has stood the test as a 
substitute for violence. Not for nothing has war 
been called the ultima ratio. War has always 
been and is now the last expedient in bringing 
about selection in the mores, and any other form 
of conflict may run out into war. 



VII. PUBLIC OPINION AND THE NA- 
TIONAL CODE 

The code of any peace-group must contain, of 
necessity, taboos on violence, and also upon con- 
duct likely to lead to violence ; otherwise the 
existence of the group would always be in jeopardy. 
"Thou shalt not kill" and "thou shalt not steal" 
are such taboos. Any member who transgresses 
these formulations of adjustment to life-conditions 
is removed from the group or some attempt is 
made to force him into harmony. The code of 
any peace-group whatsoever must contain these 
taboos as a condition of being a peace-group ; this 
has been tested over and over throughout human 
history, has become traditional, and is never 
questioned. Other items in the code of a modern 
nation, such as freedom of conscience, are of much 
later development, having been acquired within 
the recent historic period. No variations are 
permitted that may tend to weaken these funda- 
mentals ; in fact, every variation is tested on 
the criterion of its consistency with the funda- 

58 



PUBLIC OPINION 59 

mentals. Thus is many a proposed law declared 
unconstitutional, that is, inconsistent with the 
national principles, or the genius of national in- 
stitutions. 

But where the fundamentals of the code are not 
obviously in question, a flexible and adaptable 
societal system will show free and versatile va- 
riation. Such variability has a high selective 
value, for its presence means a heightened chance 
of securing, through multiplied expedients, a 
speedy and adequate adjustment. But that re- 
sult cannot come about unless unhampered free- 
dom of expression is accorded to the producers of 
any new expedient for living, whereby they may 
seek to offer it for imitation and concurrence, 
spontaneous or induced, in competition with 
other variations. I have said that such com- 
petition aims at power, political or other; but 
that power can be gained only by winning over 
public opinion. Now, public opinion is commonly 
supposed to be responsive to reason, and people 
who accept that supposition are led to lay much 
stress upon reasoned and purposeful individual 
initiative as a moving force in societal evolution. 
If such a position is sound, then society practices 
a rational selection among its mores, and there- 
fore a rational adjustment to its life-conditions. 



60 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

It is necessary to reflect upon this matter before 
we go on. 

In conceiving of public opinion we are all in- 
clined to think of it as the opinion of our own 
circle of life, and if one's circle is composed chiefly 
of educated people, as is generally the case with 
any theoretical writer, he is apt to assume that 
public opinion includes a large element of the in- 
tellectual or of the rationally discriminative. 
But genuine public opinion cannot be anything 
else than the consensus of the whole society ; and 
the vast bulk of any society is composed of so- 
called "common people," not at all or not very 
well educated, of horizons much limited, and with- 
out the time, surplus energy, or even capacity to 
grapple intellectually with broad and general 
issues. This is no indictment of those who form 
the solid strength of any society ; in fact there 
are not a few of those who are regarded as in- 
tellectuals because of eminence in certain re- 
stricted fields, who are both artless and child-like 
when they set out to pass judgment on the societal 
order. The scope of any human intellect is 
circumscribed. Few men can deal intelligently 
with the broadest issues of societal adjustment. 
There is no immediate test or verification to go by, 
and it is generally only after the issue is long past 



PUBLIC OPINION 61 

that the "verdict of history," the only sure one, 
can be rendered. 

Public opinion, in brief, is a matter of feeling 
rather than of intellect ; and the feeling is de- 
veloped in connection with a more or less localized 
interest. If such interests are being realized, 
public opinion is favorable to or acquiescent in 
the societal order; if not, there is "unrest" and 
a threat of conflict to secure change. Men adjust 
consciously only to what they can see, or visual- 
ize, or think they see. This may be thoroughly 
irrational, as with the primitive people, who have 
a whole set of adjustments to a world of ghosts 
and demons — a construction that can withstand 
none of our accepted tests of reality. 

And yet it is possible to contend that public 
opinion is prevailingly "right" — even that the 
vox -populi is the vox dei. Public opinion sup- 
ported primitive religions. We cannot at all 
agree with the feeling back of it. But the re- 
ligions were of the highest societal effectiveness, 
constituting as they did, among other things, a 
powerful disciplinary factor just when and where 
discipline was most needed. They had a high 
survival-value and public sentiment was "right" 
in supporting them. Society automatically used 
the public opinion, intellectually mistaken as it 



62 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

was, with the result of securing adaptation to con- 
ditions that really existed, and to them as they 
existed. Men in those elder ages never saw the 
societal expediency of their religion ; it was all 
the time being put to uses quite other than those 
which had won it the favor of the public. No 
matter whence or how they arose, or how they 
were viewed by the individual mind, the religious 
institutions represented a real adjustment to life- 
conditions, and therefore persisted, surviving all 
sorts of selective tests along their course. 

I do not wish to say that enlightenment has not 
enabled a modern society to proceed more in- 
telligently and consciously toward its destiny ; 
but any one who faces the facts will have to con- 
clude that intelligent and conscious action is 
still, among the masses of mankind, confined for 
the most part to local issues and even to personal 
exigencies. The wider view is the rare view; it 
is, for example, the view of the statesman as con- 
trasted with that of the "practical politician." 
Most of us are but little concerned in action that 
contemplates a distant or universal result ; few 
people can take a deep intelligent interest in a 
social program, like that of eugenics, which aims 
at an improvement of the whole human race some 
centuries hence. The human tendency is to 



PUBLIC OPINION 63 

shrink such a program down to a proximate, im- 
mediate aim ; to make it bear on the present 
situation, and upon the local interest of the ad- 
herent. 

Certainly the adjustment of a nation's code, let 
alone that of a race, to life-conditions is one of 
those matters that transcend the mental outfit 
and powers of most, if not of all men. How, then, 
can public opinion be trusted to settle such an 
issue .'^ The answer is, because the process is 
typically automatic and impersonal, of a larger 
potency than any intellect-directed process can be, 
and must of necessity work out into adjustment. 

Consider the adjustment secured by natural 
selection, which is so apt that it was at first un- 
hesitatingly ascribed to infinite intelligence, and 
so rational in its outcome that the best brains of 
mankind have been employed for centuries in 
simply following out the process and seeing how 
it was done. Science has limped along after 
natural fact; after the act it has offered, at 
length, its rational explanation ; but would it 
trust itself, even now, to vie with the process 
which it has followed and learned? 

What science has learned is how things are and 
how they go, in the natural order. These pro- 
cesses cannot be altered, but they can be fallen in 



64 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

with, or adjusted to, with the result of human well- 
being. There is here no negation of the value of 
human knowledge and of action in its light. And 
the case is similar in the societal realm. The 
process, here too, is "right" as the natural pro- 
cess is "right" because it is of the same impersonal, 
elemental nature. The test is, in one case as in 
the other, the magnificently simple and con- 
clusive one of persistence or non-persistence. 
Our business is to learn how things are and how 
they go, in the societal order ; these processes, 
like the natural ones, cannot be altered, but we 
can fall in with them, or adjust to them, with the 
result of societal well-being. 

Recurring now to public opinion, which comes 
near to being the elemental force in societal evo- 
lution, we find it based upon sentiment and in- 
terest rather than upon intellectual analyses of 
complicated conditions. Upon interest — but 
here is precisely the touchstone of society's ad- 
justments : do they subserve interests or do they 
not ? Each local group, while incompetent to 
survey the interests of the whole society, is clear 
enough upon its own immediate status, for it has 
to live from day to day in that status, and it 
knows without much cerebration whether life is 
comfortable or not. It is the only agency that 



PUBLIC OPINION 65 

can pass upon that question ; for it is well-nigh 
impossible for a member of one group to see the 
life in another as a member of the latter sees it. 
If each group is to judge of its own interests, the 
responsibility lies precisely where the real ex- 
perience is. The resulting inferences as to what 
ought to be done may be wrong ; in fact, through 
the suggestion of interested parties a group or 
class may be persuaded that it has cause for dis- 
content when none would be felt if it were let alone ; 
but it is just the virtue of the automatic process 
that under it such unrealities at once encounter, 
along with the realities, an unplanned test by 
conflict. If there is anything in proposed va- 
riations of the code, it will come out, at length; 
if there are only phantasms, they will be dissipated 
under the test. If all the interests, locally felt 
and locally defended, have their chance within 
the arena marked out by the limits set in the 
national code, the composite product of the con- 
sequent selection, neither foreseen nor planned by 
any one, will represent a more expedient adjust- 
ment for the whole society. And if the arena is 
too narrow, or the restriction too cramping, that 
too will take care of itself; the pressiu'e of dis- 
contented groups s bound to increase under 
repression until the conflict issues in a revolu- 



66 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

tionary modification of the broader outlines of the 
society's code, or even in the violent disruption 
of the peace-group itself. Adjustment to life- 
conditions is a necessity of life, for organism or 
society. It is bound to come. 

The peace-group, as we have seen, is an ex- 
pedient for living whose efficacy is unquestioned 
by any one except, perhaps, certain crazy anar- 
chists. But its adaptability, through freedom 
accorded to public opinion, has been a matter of 
growth. At an early period in the world's history 
it was not in the mores to allow of the free ex- 
pression of general opinion. "Sit down thyself 
and cause the rest of the people to sit down," 
suggests Odysseus, blandly, to the excited noble, 
"for not yet dost thou clearly know what is the 
mind of the son of Atreus" ; but with the common 
man he uses harsher measures, and thunders : 
"Sit still and harken to the words of others who 
are your betters ! On no account shall all the 
Achseans be king here. Not good is the rule of 
many; one is to be leader, one king." Yet even 
in Homer's time, and in war, the assembly of the 
people could make itself felt by peaceable means, 
even though the threat of violence lay not far 
away. 

The course of civilization has been marked by a 



PUBLIC OPINION 67 

progressive enlargement of the range of expression 
accorded to the popular will. This has assured 
the stability of peace-groups to a higher and higher 
degree, for it has amounted to enlarged oppor- 
tunity for the realization of interests without 
resort to violence. It is the justification for a 
freedom of speech almost bordering upon license, 
that popular discontent may thus blow itself off 
into thin air and do no such damage as it might 
if confined. Limitation of freedom of expression 
is popular only when the group-code and the senti- 
ment of patriotism supporting it are endangered 
and outraged. 

Formerly, then, there was little apparatus for 
the expression of public opinion. The society was 
conceived to be in the hands of its rulers. Theo- 
retically the Homeric king was the only person 
who had a right to speak, even in the assembly, 
and if any one else wanted the floor, he had the 
privilege conferred upon him by being handed the 
royal scepter. The assembly of all tribal members, 
in earlier European times, often had no other mode 
of expression than applause or silence in the face 
of an announcement of intent. But this state 
of inarticulateness was succeeded by the evolu- 
tion of various devices — into the detail of which 
we need not go — which limited the power of the 



68 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

ruler by allowing registration of the popular will. 
When the king ceased to be a religious fetish and 
lost "divine right," there fell away, for the eman- 
cipated peoples, a formidable barrier to the free 
expression of public opinion. 

The modern form of adjustment in this matter 
of enfranchising public opinion is democracy, 
where, as the etymology of the term indicates, 
recognition is accorded to no ruler at all except 
the demos or people. But no society can get 
along without an executive of its will. There 
has always been an executive of the society's code ; 
the only difference between types of executive 
worth mentioning in this connection has lain in 
the degree of responsibility imposed. The execu- 
tive is but a man, and he belongs to some class 
in the society. If not responsible, he may try 
to impose a capricious personal will or the special 
code of his class. As a matter of fact, there was 
always a limit to this sort of thing, even if it had 
to be established by assassination. Deposition of 
some sort has been common enough under un- 
limited monarchies. Under the constitutional 
monarchy, the constitution or charter of rights 
laid down the essentials of the national code, and 
the executive was held responsible for its defense 
and upholding, as well as limited to action within 



PUBLIC OPINION 69 

it. If he or his class abused their position of 
power to tamper with the code of rights, there was 
always the expedient of revolution. But, in the 
recession from violence or from situations fraught 
with the threat of violence, all of which menaced 
the very peace-group itself, the device of "peace- 
ful revolution," or election, arose as a better ad- 
justment. Nowadays the executive — president 
or premier — is subject to periodic examination 
at the bar of public opinion ; the issue is as to 
whether he has executed its mandates or not. 
Meanwhile the king, where there is one, is a 
survival except as he symbolizes continuity, and 
in some other relatively unimportant respects. 

The election, though it is associated with per- 
sons, is essentially a selection in the details of the 
national code — details surrounding the unques- 
tioned essentials to which allusion has several 
times been made. Some elections are frankly the 
decision of an issue, as, for example, woman- 
suffrage ; and the party platforms sometimes 
make a clear presentation of an issue, as where 
protection and free trade have stood over against 
one another. A party espouses a certain type of 
societal policy and draws its adherents from cer- 
tain well-recognized groups in the population 
that have, or think they have, interests in common. 



70 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

A revolt against the traditional code may bring 
about a new alignment, as in the case of the Pro- 
gressives. However, when certain men have been 
elected, while it is understood that their special 
policies are to prosper with them, they are yet 
bound to uphold the national code and to look 
after the essential interests of all their constituents, 
of whatever political faith. The representatives 
are those to whom is delegated the selective 
power of public opinion, so far as their constitu- 
encies go, but the delegating body can hold them 
responsible, for it has regularly recurring oppor- 
tunities to continue or discontinue its representa- 
tives. The move toward the referendum and 
recall indicates discontent with the traditional 
system of representation, and impatience over 
having to wait awhile for a chance to rebuke and 
change representatives. It is an important new 
variation at the end of a long line of development, 
some of whose intervening phases we have re- 
viewed, stretching from an era of restriction of 
the popular voice toward ever greater freedom. 

Election is the typical modern method by which 
societal selection is accomplished within the peace- 
group, and an altered adjustment is attained. It 
is not asserted, however, that a single such ex- 
pression of public opinion must be "right." The 



PUBLIC OPINION 71 

candid examination of an American election ^ 
makes one dubious as to the efficacy of public 
opinion to secure expedient societal adjustments 
by this method. It can be swayed to a con- 
siderable extent by interested and unscrupulous 
parties — let one refer to Lecky on the function 
of the demagogue in a democracy,^ or to Sumner 
on "Legislation by Clamor."^ But we have as 
yet no surer device for appraising public senti- 
ment within a peace-group. It is needful for 
any one who wishes to see what there is in any 
evolutionary process to realize that much has 
been done in the lapse of time which we cannot 
perceive going on under our eyes. We have 
gained many an expedient adjustment of society 
at the hand of public opinion when, to contempo- 
raries, it appeared that the popular will, in the 
contradictoriness of its expressions, practically 
cancelled out. A societal process must be allowed 
its time and be viewed over a long perspective; 
it should not be judged by a series of isolated and 
perhaps erratic swings. Only it cannot be ac- 
credited with purposeful rationality in the attain- 
ment of adjustments, and least of all can it be 

1 For a brief account of the election as a method of societal se- 
lection, see Keller, "Societal Evolution," pp. 105-114. 
' "Democracy and Liberty," I, 22-23. 
3 In "The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays," pp. 186-187. 



72 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

referred to the individual. It shows a general 
trend and some very actual results, when viewed 
over a long enough course and in perspective. 
Evolution does not produce perfection. It does 
not even bring forth a superlative, but only com- 
paratives. Before despairing, one should always 
compare the evolutionary product with what 
went before. Defective as the election is, in 
isolated instances, one would be a bold man to 
advocate going back to the theory and practice 
out of which this freer expression of public 
opinion once developed. 

On the face of it. and in short perspective, the 
lodgment of power in a few individuals, or even 
in one autocrat, seems to attain an efficiency 
toward which a democracy vainly strains. And 
yet, to go back to a monarchical system would be 
to return to a superseded societal form. 



VIII. THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE- 
GROUP 

Hitherto the peace-group has been taken to 
include, at most, a nation, and the social code to 
be, as its widest, a national code. But the peace- 
group has shown an ampler extension than this ; 
empires have become veritable peace-groups, 
when covered by the Magna Pax Romana or the 
Magna Pax Britannica. With such cases in mind 
the conception of the peace-group may be much 
expanded. But I do not want to stop short, 
in the present instance, of the widest practicable 
application and implication of much that has 
been set down in preceding pages. If "human 
brotherhood" is ever realized, the peace-group 
will be coterminous with the world. However, 
not to consider Utopias, let us put some such 
question as this : Have not civilized nations, at 
least temporarily, actually formed a grand peace- 
group ; and is there not in existence, even now, 
an international peace-group and also a code of 
civilized nations, covering essential international 

73 



74 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

adjustments, to which all civilized nations have 
at least professed adherence? 

Whether or not civilized nations have been at 
war for fully as much of their time in the modern 
period as in former ones,^ it appears that warfare 
between nations, where the contending- parties 
have both been representatives of high civilization, 
has been progressively less frequent. And it 
certainly seems safe to say that war has not 
taken place over such a variety of issues, some of 
them relatively trivial, as was formerly the case. 
It has not taken place at all, in recent times, 
without assertions of reluctance on both sides 
and without mutual accusations, between the 
enemies, of having transgressed certain traditional 
norms of conduct. Such transgression must 
constitute, it is assumed, in the eyes of all civilized 
peoples, guilt deserving of punishment. Peace 
is in the international mores ; whatever may be 
said of the actuality of war, the tradition respect- 
ing international relations of civilized peoples 
assumes a peace unbroken save under the most 
exceptional circumstances. The fact that "con- 
fidence-men" attain success is no proof that most 
people are dishonest ; quite the reverse, for that 
success is attained because people confide in one 

1 See Woods and Baltzly, "Is War Diminishing?" 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 75 

another's honesty. Germany's doings do not 
witness for the non-existence of an international 
code, but prove rather that most nations were 
depending upon such a code, with its tradition of 
international conduct, as on a very real and trust- 
worthy thing. 

In so far as this tradition has represented the 
facts, the civilized nations have formed an inter- 
national peace-group ; and even when the tradi- 
tion has not been followed by all, it has yet borne 
witness to a tendency towards the formation 
of such a group. The very circumstance that 
appeal was made, even hypocritically, to a tradi- 
tion of international behavior, indicates that a 
set of international mores has at least been in 
process of formation. There was no law to appeal 
to. It has been asserted with much justice that, 
despite university courses in the subject, there 
is no international law ; but all civilized nations 
have recognized a body of international prece- 
dents, and there has even been an effort to legal- 
ize them by setting up an international tribunal. 
Evidently there has been rapprochement of an in- 
ternational nature, which exhibits all the essential 
marks of an at least incipient peace-group. This 
societal expedient, beginning in the primitive 
family, has extended to include tribe, nation, 



76 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

and even empire; and it seems not yet to have 
exhausted its scope. The international peace- 
group, if it has not arrived, has gotten well along 
in the process of becoming. 

There is no inherent reason why the extension 
of the peace-group must be limited by national 
boundaries. It is an adaptation to conditions of 
living presented to human society ; and if it has 
shown undoubted survival-value for ever larger 
and larger societies, and has successfully tran- 
scended boundary after boundary, the inference 
is that there is no limit to its expediency set by 
the increasing size of the compounded societal 
group. But it is also evident that, since the 
peace-group is made possible only by the fact that 
its members possess essential mores and interests 
in common, so that they may all adhere to a 
broad code in the matter of the essentials of con- 
duct, competing as respects minor interests with- 
out violence — it is evident, I say, that each exten- 
sion of this group involves greater complexity and 
refinement of adjustment. The larger the peace- 
group, as we have seen, the fewer the mores held 
in common by all parties. The code of the large 
peace-group is composed of few items ; more inter- 
ests have to be settled by competition ; and so there 
is always more chance that violence will break out. 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 77 

One of the essentials of a stable peace-group is 
that its constituent parts shall understand each 
other, at least in a general way. This is one of 
the fundamental reasons for insisting upon a 
single national language ; the peace-group that 
can place that one of the mores in its code adds 
immensely to its stability. Compare the British 
and the Dual Empires in the matter of their 
stability, and note the efforts of Germany to 
further the assimilation of Alsace-Lorraine by 
forcing out the former tongue. But all such 
insistence upon homogeneity in the national unit 
accentuates its individuality ; and that makes the 
formation of a larger international composite the 
more difficult. The more perfect the organization 
of the national peace-groups, and the more settled 
and definite their codes, the more trouble is there 
bound to be in the construction of an inter- 
national peace-group. It is like trying to secure 
a general agreement among adult persons of 
pronounced convictions and individuality. 

Aside from the obvious difference in language, 
the separate nations have never understood one 
another very well, and their divergences have been 
emphasized by their ethnocentrism. No wonder, 
therefore, that the adjustment to civilized society's 
life-conditions represented by an international 



78 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

peace-group is as yet an imperfect one. It could 
never have appeared at all except for the previous 
partial conquest of numerous barriers calculated 
to keep nations apart and unable to understand 
one another. These barriers were such as pre- 
vented or hindered the inter-transmission of the 
mores, and their conquest was at the hand of 
agencies, for the most part automatically de- 
veloped, which furthered such transmission. 

Of all the agencies which have brought groups 
of men into proximity so that they could know 
and learn from one another, become similar, 
tolerant, or even, at length, friendly, by far the 
most effective is trade. Doubtless the first 
peaceful meeting-ground of tribes and nations 
was the market. The development of trade has 
been a thoroughly and typically natural and auto- 
matic movement, directed by immediate self- 
interest and with no purpose in view except the 
realization of definite, material ends. Yet, al- 
though the trader directly and consciously 
assaulted no one of the barriers to peace and the 
mutual assimilation of codes, he ended by under- 
mining and levelling most of them. He trans- 
mitted products, then processes, then mores in 
general, between nation and nation. I need not 
go into the detail of this transmission, which 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 79 

resulted in a spreading similarity in civilization 
and a consequent lessening of the feeling of 
strangeness and hostility. Other agencies of 
transmission operated along with trade, the most 
modern of these being, perhaps, the novel. 
Most people know little of Russia, for example, 
outside of what Turgenev, Dostoyevski, and other 
Russian writers have told them. The net result 
of all the inter-transmission has been the possi- 
bility of the rapprochement of which I have 
spoken. When that possibility emerged, the 
automatic drift of civilized nations was toward 
an agreement upon essentials, and a shifting of 
conflict from its violent phase into an industrial, 
commercial, or other peaceable competition. 

This is, on the larger scale, what happened in 
the formation of the more limited peace-group. 
There are essentials upon which all combining 
elements at least profess to agree ; then there are 
the minor matters concerning which they remain 
in constant, but peaceful conflict and competition. 
But nations are not so willing to sign away portions 
of their independence as are constituent groups 
within the same nation ; there is not the same 
mutual confidence, nor is there the same apparatus 
of centralization. Nearly all groups in this 
country are willing to abide by the decisions of 



80 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the Supreme Court ; but when it comes to an in- 
ternational court of arbitration, certain reserva- 
tions are made, for example, touching questions 
of national "honor." No nation is sure that all 
of the essentials of its code are going to be rep- 
resented in the official international code which 
such a court is designed to interpret. 

Each nation is concerned for its interests be- 
cause the comparatively few items of the inter- 
national code have to be stated in comprehensive 
and therefore somewhat vague terms, and seem 
susceptible of a variety of interpretations. And 
there has been developed no system for checking up 
the international authorities, in so far as they may 
be taken to exist at all. The whole organization 
of the international peace-group is, in brief, 
inchoate and unstable, and public opinion, with- 
out reasoning that out, feels it and becomes wary 
of committing itself. Perhaps if there could have 
been a world-empire of some sort, corresponding 
to the original despotism of the group-chief, 
there would have been something definite and 
actual to check and modify, as there was in the 
case of the smaller society. The case is always 
more natural where there is something positive 
upon which to use negative, restrictive methods, 
than where there is something to build up out 



THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE-GROUP 81 

of chaotic materials. Most human institutions 
are formed as the statue is freed from the rugged 
block, by hacking, and at length chiseling away 
the jagged corners and unlovely attachments 
that imprison the real figure, as someone has 
expressed it, within the originally rude mass. 

Yet there has been, in peace-group forming, 
something original and crude to hack at and to 
chisel down, and that was the general savagery of 
former international relations. The rude and 
shapeless block, in the case of any human in- 
stitution, has been always a chaotic mass of 
mores, and the drill and chisel have been the taboo. 
The taboo has been the great institution-shaper. 
Let us desert, for the time, the apparently dubious 
recent projects aimed at the creation of an inter- 
national peace-group, and look into the process 
from the other end, trying to follow somewhat 
up its line of evolution. This will lead us to 
consider the modification of the earlier forms 
toward what we have, rather than to speculate 
upon what we can do, by taking thought, or to 
worry over what seems, in our disillusionment, 
impossible. 



IX. THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 

We start, then, from the violent conflict between 
tribes and nations and are to follow its modifica- 
tions toward peaceful competition. Always out of 
the war-element have sprung variations making 
for peace ; and, though we cannot often see the why 
and how, it is yet an undeniable fact that they 
have survived and replaced mores of violence. 
The methods of the violent conflict itself have been 
altered toward mildness. Once warfare was like 
the chase and utterly unregulated by any taboos. 
There was no warning declaration, no quarter to 
the vanquished, no chivalry of any sort. Poisoned 
springs, poisoned thorns planted upright in the 
path, or poisoned weapons were common enough 
in war-practice. Any method was good that 
secured the result. But long ago all this was 
altered : then declaration came seldom to be 
omitted, prisoners were adopted or enslaved, and 
the duel or the gantlet gave a captive at least a 
theoretic chance. Odysseus could get no poison 
in Ephyre to anoint his arrows withal, for the 

82 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 83 

man to whom he appHed would not give, fearing 
the immortal gods. The other forms of poisoning, 
assaults without warning, mutilation, torture, and 
many another savage custom were superseded. 
The rules of war were developed — rules that a 
proper man or tribe would not think of infring- 
ing. For most savage peoples war became, in a 
certain rude sense, a gentleman's game. Punctilios 
grew up along these lines until warfare became as 
humane, courteous, and high-minded as such a 
practice could well be. 

There were developed also small oases or nuclei 
of peace, in the shape of truces for burying the 
dead or for other purposes, and treaties of alliance, 
offensive and defensive. In connection with trade, 
and sanctioned by religion, there grew up several 
types of peace — the market-peace, the temple- 
peace, the Peace of God. The mutual suspicion 
that is revealed so significantly in "dumb barter" 
or "silent trade" was allayed, so that merchant 
and customer trusted themselves in one another's 
proximity, even unarmed. Disputes came to be 
discussed and smoothed over, revenge for injuries 
sustained was commuted into property-payments. 
The apparatus, personnel, and methods of diplo- 
macy began to appear. Numerous courteous 
forms of inter-group communication sprang up — 



84 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

forms often empty in the fact, but whose existence 
was significant of conciliation rather than of 
defiance or indifference. 

Further and more detailed agreements came 
to be made, as the centuries passed, concerning 
the occasions and methods of war-making, con- 
cerning trade in all its aspects, "freedom of the 
seas," spheres of interest or influence, religion, 
extradition, immigration, copyright, the mails, 
and thousands of other matters, smaller and 
greater. By many agreements of this order, and 
potentially by each of them, there was averted 
an unmistakable possibility of resort to arms. 
They were nearly all, therefore, in effect taboos 
on violence, and, as such, constructive of peace. 
Among civilized nations they came gradually to 
constitute a series of traditions or precedents, 
and behavior in accordance with this code became 
the mark of the civilized nation or a member 
thereof. 

Further transmission of the mores, possible 
now that nations might be at peace for pro- 
tracted periods, and might come, through the 
development of trade and communications, to be 
ever better acquainted with one another, led to 
concurrence of all in variations developed by 
some. The Germans speedily adopted the Ameri- 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 85 

can invention or process; the Americans visited 
the German cities to study their municipal 
administration with a view to adapting and 
adopting it. Especially did the New World 
send students to the Old, to acquire learning and 
polish of manners. Many departments of societal 
life, but especially the economic, took on an 
essential similarity over the civilized world. It 
was a case of concurrence in selected variations 
which, as the event proved, secured better adjust- 
ment to the life-conditions of the several societies. 

And among the sweeping adjustments was the 
democratic state, of which I have spoken ; freedom 
of public opinion and the control by peoples of 
their own destinies, by way of parliamentary 
government, came to be the mode in the civilized 
world. 

In a still more general way, the evolution of 
society led toward the supersession of mediaeval 
methods resting upon suspicion of machiavellian 
policies on the part of the governments of fellow- 
nations. All could not be trusted to general 
sentiments of mutual fairness, good-will, and 
friendship, however insistently these were voiced 
upon public occasions; but a nation's honor was 
supposed to be involved in the keeping of its 
voluntary engagements, and it was almost if not 



86 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

quite unheard-of that a government should not 
try to prove that it had been honorable, even 
though it had not. That degree, at least, of def- 
erence to the international code could be counted 
on. 

For there was here, in actuality, such a code. 
I have not aimed at exhaustiveness in the pre- 
ceding sketch of the mores that developed within 
the international group. The group was an 
imperfect thing, and the code was not imperative 
in anything like the same degree as a national 
code with a government behind it. It could not 
be that, in the past or present, and may never 
be so. But it is plain enough that civilized 
nations have been long on the way toward an 
automatic ordering of their joint destiny — long 
on the way, to secure even so imperfect a result as 
the one before us, with the inferential prospect 
of remaining yet long on the way before it can 
be realized in any perfection — plainly, however, 
on the way, if a long enough sweep of societal 
evolution is surveyed. 

Now it is possible to get a sense of the real 
existence of an international code by asking why a 
certain nation, say Turkey, is not included within 
the concourse of civilization. The former Ar- 
menian massacres, together with many another 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 87 

sinister performance, rule her out. And why? 
Because such things are forbidden by the civiKzed 
code. Russia's pogroms, and the general character 
of her government, were hardly outweighed by 
certain positive qualifications. But Japan was 
of the group. The disqualifications are easier 
to name than the qualifications for membership. 
It is a harder task to determine what conduct is 
consonant with a code than what is not ; for the 
code, from the Decalogue down, is couched, if 
reduced at all to form, in the negative — Thou 
shalt not. 

In general, it is to those same mores which 
enable a smaller society to hold together in 
adjustment to life-conditions that nations must 
cling, if they are to form, or while they form, even 
temporarily, a peace-group. We have seen that 
the two taboos on killing and stealing have had to 
be enforced as a condition of societal survival. 
But all such taboos confer rights; the two just 
mentioned confer respectively the right to life 
and the right to property within the peace-group 
— not outside, for peace is preserved only within 
the boundaries, and it has always been laudable 
to kill and rob the member of the "out-group.** 
Similarly, all the taboos connected with any code 
confer rights of one kind or another upon the 



88 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

adherents of the code, that is, the members of the 
peace-group in question. And there is a duty 
corresponding to each such right, imposed upon 
each group-member, namely, to support the right 
conferred. In a stable peace-group any member 
may be called upon to help enforce the code and 
punish its transgressor — to enforce and punish 
by violence, if need be. The extreme of individual 
punishment is always exclusion, permanent or 
for a term, from the society. The laws, being 
the crystallized part of the code, carry a threat of 
such punishment for conduct varying widely from 
the norm. Minor offenses against local codes 
are visited with ostracism, ridicule, and other 
milder penalties. 

It is now proposed to do something analogous 
in a wider field — something in the line of enforce- 
ment of the international code through the pro- 
jected League to Lnforce Peace. We are not 
interested here in programs, but in historic fact. 
The fact is that each of the nations now bellig- 
erent claims to be fighting because it, or some 
other member of the concourse of civilized nations, 
has been injured as respects some right guaranteed 
by the common code. But this implies that the 
international peace-group ought to have been 
able to make good its guarantee without any one 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 89 

resorting to arms, and that it has failed. And 
that implication introduces the query as to 
whether an enlarged peace-group can assure any 
international rights by peaceful means. 

But now the international peace-group has not 
yet taken form sufficiently to have developed 
apparatus for guaranteeing anything. Even the 
very ancient nation had a king into whose hands 
the mores were delivered for safeguarding; but 
there is no corresponding international func- 
tionary. There is no executive. There is also 
no law-making body, nor yet a judiciary whose 
authority is habitually deferred to. If we ask 
what rights the international peace-group might 
claim to secure — which is equivalent, as we 
have seen, to inquiring as to what taboos there 
are in the international code — we find that these 
latter are nowhere stated in authoritative guise, 
as in a constitution. They are not codified in 
specific form; they are not even recorded in a 
generalized form. Some authors have sought to 
assemble international cases or to generalize upon 
international usage in some particular field, but 
no recognized codification has emerged. 

The international political or governmental 
organization — the apparatus for international 
control — is where the organization of the national 



90 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

peace-group was some time ago. There is, among 
civilized nations, a common public opinion, and 
that public opinion can and does distinguish 
between civilized and other conduct. There are 
also precedents based upon former settlements, 
secured by conflict or compromise between two 
or more nations. But that is all there is. For 
enforcing its behests the "judgment of civiliza- 
tion" is provided with no current and usual means 
short of violence or the threat of violence. 

Nations stand toward one another a good deal 
as individuals or small societies stood, before the 
advent of enforceable law; they strive to realize 
their own interests with small heed to the wider 
interests of the corporate body of which they are 
coming to form a part. They make common 
cause with, or fall into disagreement with their 
fellows, according as their lasting or shifting 
interests harmonize or antagonize. The result 
is large-scale alignment or opposition, on the 
order of the party alliance and opposition within 
the better organized smaller peace-group. But 
there is no way of really settling differences short 
of force. There is no parallel to the election, 
but at best a veiled military menace. Ententes, 
understandings, treaties, balancings of power are 
the only devices for preserving the peace — 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 91 

between the contracting parties as well as between 
the alliance and awed outsiders — and these as- 
sociations are only as strong as their weakest 
links, their least interested members. They are 
often also secret arrangements, a fact which leads 
of course to mutual distrust and suspicion. They 
are untrustworthy and always imply a threat of 
violence. They are very far inferior to the 
arrangements for securing the rights of component 
parts, as developed in the older and smaller types 
of the peace-group. There is, in a word, no in- 
ternational organization of control. There is a 
recession from war as a means of settlement, but 
there is nothing definite and reliable to take its 
place. 

There is only the diplomacy that finds its 
expression in the treaties and other arrangements 
alluded to. This factor, however, is not to be 
despised. I have quoted some one who said : 
"If peoples are mad enough, they will fight ; " and 
the speaker added : "If they aren't, the ordinary 
means of diplomacy will do." That is, diplomacy 
will secure peace up to a certain point, and on the 
minor issues. It may prevent a minor issue from 
becoming, through misunderstanding and excite- 
ment, a major one. It is full of compromise and 
of the quid pro quo. It is like the settlement out 



92 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

of court. It helps to make precedents, and has 
been of solid utility in preventing conflict. But 
it represents no real control. It has no organiza- 
tion and is generally an affair of two nations rather 
than an international thing. It shows a set of 
variations in international mores rather than a 
settled institutional form. Its practice represents 
international politics rather than international 
statesmanship. 

But its out-reachings are promising, as the 
variation is always prophetic of better adaptation. 
Once there was no diplomacy to speak of, and 
what there was lay between small isolated tribes ; 
now its field has expanded and it is doing for the 
larger groups what it once did for the smaller. 
There it led to closer and closer agreements and 
to alliances ; and it is the basis, as we have seen, 
of the ententes and other wide rapprochements of 
great nations. It undoubtedly prevented tribal 
wars and spread mutual knowledge and tolerance ; 
and it has unquestionably staved off international 
conflict and brought nations into alliance for a 
common cause. It has also improved in quality, 
until, in the most enlightened hands, it has 
ceased to be a mere art of trickery and double- 
dealing ; the diplomat is supposed to guard the 
honor of his country. It is a shock to the civilized 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 93 

world when an accredited representative of a civil- 
ized nation takes advantage of the hospitality ac- 
corded him to exhibit the traits of uncivilization. 
In such a case, the government that sent him 
hastens to disavow and punish his action, at least 
in form, unless it wishes to recognize him, and it, 
as correctly representing his country of origin and 
its degree of civilization. However, diplomacy is 
not the definite thing that can replace violent 
conflict between nations, as the political competi- 
tion has displaced the conflict in arms within the 
range of a centralized governmental control. 
International competition has not yet arrived at 
any settled form of combination representing an 
adjustment that renders the primitive form of 
militancy obsolete. 

Within the smaller peace-group, with its politi- 
cal competition, the peace is to be kept, who- 
ever wins. Nothing such appears in the larger 
group. One nation is overreached in diplomacy, 
and at once gets ready to adjourn to another arena 
where diplomacy is not. But within both smaller 
and larger groups there is a further form of 
peaceful competition, the industrial and commer- 
cial, or, to cover both terms with one, the economic. 
It is very largely in connection with this form of 
conflict that diplomacy has been developed. Com- 



94 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

mercial competition, in earlier times, was a 
development out of war-competition, and readily 
ran back into the violence out of which it came. 
Piracy was a sort of reverse side of early trade ; 
for a long time the violent form persisted along- 
side the peaceful one, and the merchant was trader 
or pirate according to circumstances. Trade 
wars were common even after the world-market 
began to develop ; every rival nation was after a 
monopoly, which was successively held by force, 
and lost to force, by Venetians, Portuguese, 
Spanish, and Dutch. Then came agreements of 
various sorts, arranged by diplomatic agents, and 
accompanied by the growth of the sentiment that 
they must be lived up to. 

When the international competition became 
also industrial, that is, when a market was sought 
for the products of national industries, the con- 
flict became even keener. But the competitors 
clung to peace as to an indispensable condition. 
In the economic field the trade-war was no longer 
a matter of guns. There was talk about trade 
following the flag, while the world was not as 
yet partitioned off into spheres of influence and 
colonies ; but latterly it was seen by most civilized 
nations that, despite tariff barriers and other 
artificial hindrances, economic success went to 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 95 

the nation that could most efficiently produce 
and most skillfull market its wares. The 
economic competition was what engaged the at- 
tention of the most advanced nations, and the 
possibility of a resort to violence seemed, for the 
most part, remote. Few realized that Germany 
could not be content with her rapid and regular 
successes in this competition, but was eagerly 
awaiting the day when she might destroy the 
great rival upon whom she was pressing, in legiti- 
mate wise, so closely. There was here, in form at 
least, a close approximation to the conditions 
obtaining in a real peace-group. 

As I have said, there was no controlling and 
guaranteeing international organization. Confi- 
dence in living on safely under keen economic 
competition rested in agreements of various sorts, 
guaranteed solely by the good faith of their 
makers. It was in the mores that nations should 
keep their word and serve their own honor. A 
"decent respect for the opinion of mankind" 
demanded that. It was so much a matter of 
course that, when one of the competitors turned 
out to be treacherous, the rest were taken almost 
completely by surprise. 

It is not to be understood that the nations were 
looking out for one another's interests, in an 



96 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

altruistic way. That was not the reason for 
even that unparalleled British freedom of trade 
under which alone the economic successes of other 
nations in the world-market became possible. 
No nation was ready, with self-abnegation, to 
fight another's battle, or in any way to support a 
competitor against its own interest. No nation 
cared to interfere with another's mores, for example 
with polygamy, in a purely disinterested way. It 
was precisely because each was pursuing its own 
interests and securing agreements that furthered 
them that, as in the smaller peace-group, the 
interests of all were in the proper hands and 
came to be realized to a degree permitting of 
content under the system. Nations, like classes, 
knew their own interests best, and in confining 
their attention to realizing them, were trying to 
do precisely what they were best fitted to do. 

The query emerged above as to whether there 
were any rights conferrable by the international 
peace-group, aside from the exercise of a violence, 
or the threat of such, which, in action, would 
render the group no peace-group at all. It was 
found that the "judgment of civilization" was 
provided with no traditional means for enforcing 
its behests short of violence or the threat of it. 
The only other means in sight has been an auto- 



THE INTERNATIONAL CODE 97 

matic recession from economic relations with a 
nation that might exhibit signs of economic 
untrust worthiness. In the economic competition, 
however, civiHzed nations have found honesty and 
honor, or at least the counterfeit presentment 
of such, so good a policy that there has been 
little sinning, among themselves, against it. The 
opposite qualities have been the mark of un- 
civilization that no nation wished to bear. To 
keep agreements has been one of the basic qualifi- 
cations for membership in the concourse of civili- 
zation. The possibility of ordering existence 
within any peace-group is dependent upon the 
presence of that practice in the mores. If the 
sword is to be renounced, there must be something 
dependable in its place. Until the nature of the 
German code stood revealed, the world thought it 
had something dependable in its international 
treaties and covenants. Let us consider briefly 
the nature of that code in the light of which they 
meant nothing. 



X. THE GERMAN CODE 

No nation, in the pre-war period, was succeeding 
better in the commercial and industrial competi- 
tion between the nations than was Germany. It 
was she who injected into that competition an 
organization and system before unknown. The 
hard-headed English business man of the past, 
largely unaided by his government, had opened 
wide foreign markets with unparalleled success. 
The English method of trading abroad has been 
described as "individualism gone mad." It is 
only in relatively recent years, and then under 
the stimulus of German competition, that the 
British government has lent regular and systematic 
support to the British merchant. 

The German method was systematically 
paternalistic. The individual German trader 
was, indeed, practical and systematic ; and he 
has been aided at every turn by government- 
fostered corporations and other trade-promoting 
agencies, and also directly by the state itself. 
"The one characteristic of the trade organization 

98 



THE GERMAN CODE 99 

of Germany," wrote Professor Bishop, in the 
Atlantic for May, 1914, "which makes more 
toward eflBcieney than anything else is the co- 
operation which exists between the government, 
on the one hand, and the business interests on the 
other." 

There have been in Germany a number of 
organizations with interminable names and equally 
interminable enterprise and funds : The Imperial 
Consultative Board for the Elaboration of Com- 
mercial Measures, for example. The German 
Consular Service has advised the merchant at 
all times. The government has issued tons of 
literature for his instruction and profit. The 
railways have been caused to assist him, and the 
banks as well. The amount of official care taken 
in this matter is astonishing in its magnitude. 
All this is immensely costly — too costly for any 
other agency than the state — but it has seemed 
to prove itself worth the price. 

More than this, the government, meaning Bis- 
marck, a most skillful observer of the mores, was 
converted, along in the early eighties, to the 
creation of a colonial empire. It promptly seized 
three large areas and one small one in Africa; a 
section of New Guinea and the adjacent Melane- 
sian archipelago, re-named " Bismarck- ArchipeF ' ; 



100 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

a section of a province in China; and certain 
small islands in the Pacific.^ The representations 
of German merchants, and their plea for protection 
and for areas of trade-expansion, were largely 
responsible for this movement. This colonial 
empire, as I have elsewhere remarked, was a 
veritable seizure from under the very paws of the 
British lion. The German Commissioner beat the 
British agent to Togo, the Cameroons, and South- 
west Africa by hours, and the Melanesian holdings 
were taken in the face of British and Australian 
intentions of occupation. The Chinese station 
was exacted, under a ninety-nine year "lease," in 
consequence of the murder of certain German 
missionaries; and the current feeling as to the 
transaction found expression in the soliloquy 
attributed to the Kaiser by a comic paper: "If 
my missionaries only hold out, I shall soon own 
the earth." East Africa was acquired by the 
efiforts of three young adventurers who, sailing 
under assumed names and disguised as laborers, 
but with the support of the Society for German 
Colonization, cajoled a bundle of treaties, im- 
perfectly if at all understood, out of native chiefs. 
It was felt at the time that these proceedings 

^ The story of German colonization is rehearsed in some detail in 
Keller, "Colonization." 



THE GERMAN CODE 101 

partook of the cavalier in nature, but the British 
statesmen were too dazed, under the bullying 
abruptness of Bismarck, to make objection. Such 
forceful methods had not been in use hitherto, 
for the German sense of power had emerged but 
recently; but they were passed over, and even 
somewhat admired. The important fact that 
issues from these details is that Germany went at 
the commercial and industrial competition in a 
highly organized and systematic way; and that 
it was, openly or covertly, the State that headed 
most of the projects and saw them through. 
The British system, or lack of system, had been 
of a far less organized and artificial and more of a 
"natural" type. But this new sort of thing, 
while it was regarded as characteristic of German 
manners and lack of amenity, aroused no special 
opposition or even misgiving. 

Later on, however, certain statesmen became 
convinced that Germany was looking for trouble. 
The Kaiser's visit to the Holy Land, his proclama- 
tion of himself as protector of Islam, the incident 
of Manila Bay, the Moroccan difficulties, and other 
events of like color and betraying a certain attitude 
of mind, came to be cited as indicative of a threat 
and a menace. The diplomats conceived a grow- 
ing distaste for the behavior of German agents 



102 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

around the international conference-table. All 
these things could not be set down forthwith to 
the account of Teutonic boorishness ; there was 
calculation behind them, and a policy that included 
an overbearing belligerency and a frequent laying 
of the fist upon the saber-hilt. But the apprehen- 
sions of the diplomats received no support in 
public opinion and there were comparatively few 
who were not surprised when they turned out to 
have a very real basis. 

The unusual and offensive conduct of the 
Germans in their international relations is now 
seen to have been the inevitable reflection of their 
national code. The Prussian, said Goethe, a 
century ago, is a brute, and when he becomes 
civilized, he will be ferocious. But now, shortly 
after the middle of the last century, there occurred 
a precipitation of the German national solution 
under the master-agitation of a powerful adherent 
of autocracy, and the dominant tinge of the final 
combination was Prussian. It has so remained. 
With relentless efficiency the appropriate mores 
have been suggested, transmitted, and inculcated 
in an apt human material. The Imperial State 
was constructed as a pedestal of iron, blood- 
bathed, for the support of a ruler autocratic in 
his divine right. The whole complex of mores 



THE GERMAN CODE 103 

became more and more militaristic, the ostensible 
excuse for that retrograde tendency being the 
central position of the Fatherland, menaced on 
all sides by its "iron ring" of enemies. 

This code seemed to be succeeding well and 
became the prosperity-policy of the nation. Few 
cared or dared to question or criticize it. Then, 
coinciding with the natural self-assertive tendency 
of a newly unified people, the conviction as to its 
efficacy developed into a blind faith in its supreme 
potency, and, at length, into a degree of ethnocen- 
trism unparalleled among intelligent races. And 
finally arose the dogma of its world-mission — 
to disseminate the echt deutsche Kultur to the 
benighted or decadent nations. Thus developed 
a doctrine. 

"If you want war," writes Sumner,^ "nourish a 
doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants 
to which men ever are subject, because doctrines 
get inside of a man's own reason and betray him 
against himself. Civilized men have done their 
fiercest fighting for doctrines. The reconquest 
of the Holy Sepulcher, *the balance of power,' 
'no universal dominion,' 'trade follows the flag,' 
*he who holds the land will hold the sea,' *the 
throne and the altar,' the revolution, the faith — 

' "War and Other Essays," pp. 36, 37, 38. 



104 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

these are the things for which men have given their 
lives. . . . Think what an abomination in state- 
craft an abstract doctrine must be. Any poHtician 
or editor can, at any moment, put a new extension 
on it. The people acquiesce in the doctrine and 
applaud it, because they hear the politicians and 
editors repeat it, and the politicians and editors 
repeat it because they think it is popular. So it 
grows." 

I hardly need to go into this matter further. He 
who runs may read the outcome of the German 
doctrine. It has led Germany to hate and envy 
her even partially successful peaceful rivals, and 
to risk all the substantial meat she had by snapping 
at the reflection in the water. She wanted, not 
her legitimate share under the rules of peaceful 
competition, but all. The only way to get all was 
to break the rules. Well, she was ready, in her 
state of mores, for even that. 

The contemporary disposition and code of the 
Germans have been vigorously summed up by 
Burroughs.^ He cites a number of their unspeak- 
able atrocities ; protests rightly against the 
shallow sophistication that says: "Never mind; 
let it all pass ; business is business, and it will all 

1 "Can Peace Make Us Forget ?" A Plea for the Ostracism of all 
Things German, in the New York Tribune for December 14, 1917. 



THE GERMAN CODE 105 

be the same in a hundred years ; " and writes of 
German ideas as follows. I have seen no better 
condensed summary. 

"We do not want their ideas or their methods. 
Their ideas are subversive of our democratic ideals, 
and their methods enslave the mind and lead to 
eflBciency chiefly in the field of organized robbery. 
They are efficient as Krupp guns and asphyxiating 
gas and liquid fire are efficient. They invent 
nothing, but they add a Satanic touch to the inven- 
tions of others and turn them to infernal uses. 
They are without sentiment or imagination. 
They have broken completely with the old Ger- 
many of Goethe, of Kant and Lessing, to whom 
we all owe a debt. They are learned in the roots 
of things, but their learning is dusty and musty 
with underground conditions. They know the 
'Tree of Knowledge' at the bottom, but not at 
the top in the air and sun, where are its leaves and 
flowers and fruit. They run to erudition, but not 
to inspiration. They are a heavy, materialistic, 
grasping race, forceful but not creative, military 
but not humanistic, aggressive but not heroic, 
religious but not spiritual ; brave it may be, but 
not chivalrous, utterly selfish, thoroughly scientific 
and efficient on a low plane, as organized force is 
always efficient. 



106 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

"From current reports which, knowing the 
Germans, one readily credits, they are at this 
moment taking means to increase their birth rate 
by methods identical with those of stock men 
and dog breeders. That the German women do 
not defend themselves with liquid fire and 
asphyxiating gas shows that their morals are as 
low as those of the men and that they are the 
victims of the same civic slavery. 

"The Germans have not fought this war like 
brave, chivalrous men ; they have fought it like 
sneaks and cutthroats ; they have respected 
nothing human or divine. So far as they could 
make it so it has been an orgy of lust and 
destructiveness. When their armies are forced 
to retreat, so far as they can do it, they destroy 
the very earth behind them. They have done 
their utmost to make the reconquered territory 
of Northern France uninhabitable for generations. 
If^they could poison all the water, all the air, all 
the food of their enemies, is there any doubt that 
they would quickly do so? If they could have 
scuttled or torpedoed the British Isles and sunk 
them like a ship, would they not have done it 
long ago.f^ Of course they would have wanted to 
plunder the treasures and violate the women before 
doing so, and then the Kaiser, piously lifting his 



THE GERMAN CODE 107 

eyes before his people, would have again thanked 
God for His ' faithful cooperation,' and again 
would have prated how he would continue to 
carry on the war with 'humility and chivalry.'" 
An arrogant, grasping, and cruel winner; a 
poor loser, cherishing a malignant envy toward 
rivals — in short, a poor player of the game, ready 
to break it up to secure an advantage. That is 
what the German code has made of the German. 
No wonder that the peaceful international com- 
petition was broken up by him ; for it demands the 
same good sportsmanship to play that tremendous 
game aright as to engage in any other social 
undertaking involving competition. No wonder 
the German code has developed into a momentous 
challenge to the code of modern civilization. 



XI. THE CHALLENGE TO THE INTER- 
NATIONAL CODE 

Because my chief interest is selection by war, I 
have felt it necessary to consider rather carefully 
the constitution of the peace-group, and of those 
accompanying adaptations which allow of the 
peaceful settlement of issues, that is, of peaceful 
conflict and selection. For war-selection has 
issued in these structures for peace, and can be 
understood only as one realizes that it has been 
succeeded by them, and is now resorted to that 
they may become the more secure. Through war 
to peace. For war is a temporary thing, and we 
shall presently return to peace and its methods — 
but not before a selection has been wrought at the 
hand of war which nothing else but war can bring 
to pass, and whose completion must not be stayed 
unless it is desirable to have war invoked again. 
The issue of the present is too big for any methods 
of peaceful settlement ever developed by the race. 

In this age, with the mores of civilization always 
stressing toward peace, a world-conflict such as 

108 



CHALLENGE TO THE CODE 109 

the present one cannot arise unless there is a 
vital issue, an issue over the essentials of civiliza- 
tion. To recur yet once again to the smaller 
peace-group : here the essentials are in the 
national code and are accepted by nearly all as 
axiomatic. But suppose these essentials are 
challenged. Then, while the minor cases of di- 
vergent interests are composed by peaceful com- 
petition, under the general code, and upon it as a 
sort of touchstone, the essentials cannot be so 
settled. For there can be no reference to a wider 
peaceful authority over the challenging mores 
than the challenged code itself. It takes revolu- 
tion and civil war to bring about the composition 
of an issue as to the code itself. I refer again to 
the case of slavery in this country. The lesser 
challenges to details of the national code have been 
settled with little and local violence ; but when 
the peace-group could not continue to exist half 
one thing and half the other — without, that is, a 
clean-cut and profound selection — the violence 
has been enormous and nation-wide. 

Similarly in the case of the more comprehensive 
peace-group. There is now a Great War, enlist- 
ing nearly the whole of civilization, because there 
was a challenge to the essentials of the code of the 
civilized world. Frantic efforts to localize the 



110 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

conflict have been of no avail because the chal- 
lenge was directed unmistakably at the very heart 
of the code by which the civilized peoples had 
been living. 

It is true that the sweeping nature of the 
challenge was not clear from the outset. It 
came, in fact, unexpectedly to most of the con- 
course of nations, and the gathering revelations 
of its character remained for some time incredible. 
Only gradually did the basic issue disengage itself 
from non-essentials and stand forth stark and bare 
before the unbelievers. There is no object in 
recording in this place the successive stages of 
growing illumination and disillusion. The whole 
conflict has resolved itself into as pure a conflict 
of codes, joined on the grandest scale, as any the 
world ever saw on the smaller scale ; and the 
selection is bound to be, now or later, as decisive 
on the grandest scale as any ever witnessed on 
the smaller. The civilized world cannot continue 
to exist half one thing and half the other. Unless 
we are to turn back on the course of societal 
evolution, which is unthinkable in the absence of 
a summoning change in life-conditions, this chal- 
lenge will be repelled and annihilated. It will 
certainly be so repelled, now or later, by the un- 
hurried action of the elemental forces that are be- 



CHALLENGE TO THE CODE 111 

hind all societal evolution ; but we can save part 
of the cost of the process, paid in human suffering, 
by understanding and working with those forces. 
Let us look into the nature of the challenge, as 
at length revealed in the event. Perhaps the 
central article of all, and the one upon which the 
President has unerringly fastened, is the flouting 
of international engagements and covenants. 
This strikes at the only formulation of the inter- 
national code ever attained, and at the only 
guaranteeing power behind agreements, which is 
national honor. No civilized nation has openly 
and deliberately assaulted those fundamentals 
before, and with a counter-system in mind. Evi- 
dently, however, the German intention is to dis- 
place them in favor of something else, namely, 
national necessity backed by highly organized 
force. But this, of course, would reduce the 
international peace-group to the violent chaos 
of aforetime, out of which it has slowly and pain- 
fully emerged at the cost of endless human woe. 
It is a negation of the very beginnings of law, and 
is equivalent to the theory that any individual 
may take the law into his own hands if he needs 
to and is strong enough to defy its sponsors. One 
or the other of these theories must prevail ; they 
cannot go on side by side. 



112 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

Implicit in this item of challenge is the intention 
of bending all other interests to German interests, 
and by violence or the threat of such. Consider 
the "will-to-power" of a self-styled supreme 
nation. But this idea is utterly inconsonant with 
the international code, in so far as it has developed. 
That code contemplates an equality of nations in 
their dealings with one another. Its contention 
is on the order of "Live and Let Live." To the 
Germans the small and weak nations — weak 
because small — have no reason for or right to 
independent existence. The international code, 
voiced again by the President, holds the opposite 
view. Here again is a contrast admitting of no 
compromise. It is no less a question than of 
how the world is to be run ; and there is no doubt, 
now that the issue has been bared, about the 
world's opinion on that score. 

Challenge is thrown down, further, to the spirit 
of amity between nations upon a friendly footing ; 
it is proposed, evidently, to return to suspicion, 
treachery, and hypocrisy ; to cast aside the 
ancient mores of guestfriendship and to betray 
and use hospitality^ for all it is worth to the guest. 
No longer are we to trust the honor of a nation as 
signalized in the honorable conduct of its oflBcial 
representatives. This proposition strikes at the 



CHALLENGE TO THE CODE 113 

only settled method of composing peaceably the 
divergent interests of nations. If every ambas- 
sador were a Bernstorff, a Luxburg, or a Dumba, 
of what possible utility for a peace-group could 
the whole system of representation of foreign 
interests be ? Accredited representatives must all 
be honest and of goodwill, or they must all be 
regarded as enemies within our lines. The 
German and Austrian ambassadors have been 
spies upon friends, relying upon virtues and 
kindliness in others in order to do them treacherous 
damage with impunity. There is no possibility of 
compromise with this new theory of diplomatic 
relations. Duplicity or honesty — not half one 
thing and half the other. 

The challenge is, as we see, one involving the 
whole theory of the international peace-group. 
Germany will none of it. A whole treatise could 
be written around this contention. The issue 
at its broadest is whether civilization is to go on 
developing the international peace-group or to 
go over to the substitute set of variations fathered 
by Germany, and now thrust forward with power. 
There has to be a selection here ; and there 
never was any power short of the most strenuous 
selective factor ever developed, namely, war, 
that has any remote chance of effecting the 



114 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

selection. Not a few minor items, but all the 
major essentials of the international code are 
involved in the challenge. No more clear-cut 
issue was ever presented to human society for 
selection. 

But let us go on with other items of challenge 
to the code of civilization, not involving, perhaps, 
so direct an assault upon the existence of the 
peace-group, but seeking to abrogate the very 
mores of humanity and human pity which naked 
savages were already in primitive times respect- 
ing. For long ages, as I have shown, the methods 
of warfare have been rendered less harsh and bes- 
tial by the spontaneous development of chivalry 
and humanity. There are always in war certain 
loosenings of the codes of individuals ; the baser 
sort are freed from restraints, in their relations 
with members of the "out-group," which they 
have perforce observed in those with fellow group- 
members. But even between nations at war cer- 
tain taboos have been honored, at least in form 
and officially, which prohibited the most ruthless 
conduct. These the Germans have challenged, 
both informally and officially, cynically remarking 
that '^Krieg ist Krieg." The world is too sophisti- 
cated to be impressed with war-paint and scalps, 
but it was thought that it could be cowed by a 



CHALLENGE TO THE CODE 115 

more elaborate, systematic, and inhuman Schreck- 
lichkeit. 

It is a libel on the Hun to use his face and 
figure to symbolize the German. For a long time 
no right-minded man could believe that such 
things could be, or ever had been ; but he can 
doubt no longer. This is no gentleman's war ; 
it is not a war against civilized people, for the 
code is the mark of civilization and the German 
code is beneath that of the Sioux in their bloodiest 
days. Is it needful to go into detail.'^ Let the 
reader examine the reports of the Bryce and other 
commissions and reflect upon that evidence. In 
the most primitive days any means of killing the 
enemy would do ; well, any of them will do for the 
German, and he has a much larger choice of in- 
human devices. He is without chivalry for the 
enemy, on the field or captive. Toward the non- 
combatant and neutral he is more ferocious than 
Attila, even with his dimmer lights, ever was. 
Toward the old, the helpless, and the children he 
is a raving beast ; and toward defenseless women 
an incarnation of lust that no adjective, even 
those coined by writers on Turk and Tartar, can 
portray. It is wrong to call that lust brutal, for 
brutes never use their females in such manner; 
and it is an injustice to the most primitive man 



116 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

to call such calculated conduct barbarous or 
savage. It wants a parallel on earth. 

All this is part of the official program of fright- 
fulness ; but the ultimate purpose is a popular one, 
or there would be protest, disobedience, or revolt. 
Fancy official orders to misuse women given to 
American soldiers ; to an army whose penalty 
for rape is death. Yet the German soldiers have 
carried out the orders with gusto ; they did not 
rebuke, nor were they rebuked. It is from the 
German nation, not from a few of its rulers, that 
this challenge to humanity derives ; and the 
nation thus betrays itself as essentially uncivil- 
ized. Its assault upon civilization must be re- 
pelled as former assaults have been, if the code 
that includes what we most prize is to live on. 
The world cannot go on half-humane and half 
Vandal. Schrecklichkeit and humanity do not 
mix. The latter awaits its deliverance — its Tours 
and its Martel. 

It is, in a sense, immaterial where this German 
variation on the world-code came from, except 
that it is not to be referred to individual, purpose- 
ful action. The situation, finally revealed, is the 
challenge of the loathsome thing, and the fact 
that the challenge has been at length realized 
and taken up by civilization. The process of 



CHALLENGE TO THE CODE 117 

selection is on, in its strongest and final form. 
There is no further appeal for us if war does 
not bring a decision. The issue is the gravest 
that has ever confronted human society, and the 
selective agency is present in a power never before 
imagined. We face, indeed, a critical episode 
in societal evolution. And the apprehension of 
the issues involved has led to an alignment of 
world-opinion on a scale unparalleled in history. 



XII. THE FORMATION OF A WORLD- 
OPINION 

The striking reversal of the world's opinion 
about Germany is one of the outstanding phenom- 
ena of the war. Nearly a score of nations have 
declared war on her, and a number of others 
have broken oE relations. Openly on her side 
stand her three vassals — how willingly we cannot 
surely say. No other nation has ever seen the 
public opinion of the world so massed against it. 

A thing of this sort does not happen without 
reason. But the significant fact about this 
mobilization of public opinion is the spontaneity 
of its response. The planning and the propa- 
ganda, along with the rest of the preparedness, 
were aimed in another direction. The masses of 
civilized nations did not figure out the broad issue, 
and have not yet done so ; but they resented the 
exhibitions of malevolence and feared for their 
own interests. They went through no "Pente- 
cost of Calamity," but they came to know what 
was being done in the way of murder, robbery, 

118 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 119 

violation, and desecration, and it shocked them. 
They knew, at length, what women and children 
had to expect from the German, and the moral 
gorge rose within them. To many came an ac- 
cession of cold and relentless rage as they saw 
in the mind's eye their own wives and daughters 
at the mercy of the apostles of Kultur, and their 
young children mangled or turned out to wander 
alone and helpless through a ruined land. With a 
"larger selfishness" they rallied to the defense 
of the code of humanity. 

It took overt acts — conditions and not theories 
— to bring them to this ; and even then there was 
an interval, in the remoter countries, before in- 
credulity gave way. It is significant of much that 
German public opinion needed no such interval of 
accommodation ; it was not in a condition to 
be shocked or temporarily paralyzed by surprise. 
But the masses in other nations were not pre- 
pared. They could not have known of the great 
Goethe's scathing indictment of the Prussian. 
They could not sense the irritation of John Hay 
at Prussian "jackbootism." They knew nothing 
of German atrocities in the colonies, in apology 
for which even German officialdom adopted the 
term Tropenkoller, or madness of the tropics. 
They were not in the way of hearing of Treitschke 



120 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

or Der Tag. They regarded the saber-rattling 
as an amusing piece of boorishness, and the "shin- 
ing armor" as the theatrical posturing of an 
imperial gallery-player. They goodnaturedly ac- 
cepted the explanation that "war-lord" was a 
mistranslation of a perfectly innocuous term, 
and they even applauded, a few years ago, the 
Kaiser's pious reminder, on the occasion of his 
quarter-centenary as ruler, that peace, not war, 
had been near his heart. True ; there had been 
no war. There is always peace till there is not. 
They smiled at the old man's dreams — good old 
Bobs, who, in his eagerness lest the common 
weal take harm, saw specters in broad daylight 
— and at the young man's visions. 

But the overt acts came, and there was no 
denying them ; and there was found no appeal 
against them save to the sword. Others were 
tried faithfully enough, and patience was stretched 
to the breaking-point. Time was lost, it may be, 
by our own long effort to restore the peace-group 
by peaceful means ; but the ultimate failure of 
that effort was more convincing to us and to the 
world than anything else could have been. It 
settled the fact that the essence of the inter- 
national code had been deliberately challenged, 
and that war was the only possible arbitrament. 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 121 

for it was the only argument that the challenger 
could understand. If our protracted patience, 
and our repeated and reiterated reference to the 
essentials of the code, to honor and humanity, 
had not availed, certainly no other and weaker 
nation could hope to convert and persuade by 
its representations. The President's repeated 
notes not only revealed that Germany was 
challenging the essentials of civilization, but they 
formulated, as it had not before been formulated, 
the code that was in peril. It stood forth, in 
the President's hands, as something eminently 
desirable and indispensable. The vague con- 
ceptions of simpler minds were crystallized into 
definite form, for the exposition of the essentials 
of international behavior was done with the same 
sort of simple clarity that Lincoln was master of. 
And it was not alone the simpler minds that were 
clarified — was it not Lincoln, again, who said 
that if a proposition was stated clearly enough 
for the simple to understand, the wise had no 
excuse for not understanding.? In any case, the 
sentiment arose that, while there was an approved 
way for human beings and nations to live and act, 
Germany would have none of it, and meant to 
replace the traditional code by another of which 
she was making a repulsive exhibition. The 



122 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

alternative was to renounce the old code or fight ; 
and the decision of civilization was for the latter. 
Even the Allies, already in the field, saw better 
now what they were fighting for, and took heart 
when they knew that the rest of civilization was 
with them. 

Evidently the former international peace-group 
has broken down. There are now two peace- 
groups, of two different varieties, fighting one 
another. The initial advantage was all on the 
challenging side, for, in addition to its status of 
readiness, its organization was better fitted for 
the exercise of violence. Apart from the pity of 
it, there was a question about the ability of 
essentially peaceful, industrial societies to go back 
and succeed in violent conflict, to which they had 
become disaccustomed, against an enemy that 
was never out of practice. It was and has 
remained a question whether a group of free 
and independent democracies could attain to 
the integration of a group whose whole control 
lay in a single dominant body. It was a question 
of becoming proficient, against the will, in a 
cruder form of conflict than the one to whose 
conditions adjustment had been made. The 
antagonist had selected his own weapons, method 
of combat, and time ; he had to be faced on his 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 123 

own selected ground. It has been a grand test 
of adaptability for the industrial nations. 

But the spirit of civilization has risen to meet 
the crisis. Here is something, however repugnant, 
that has to be done. Fire has to be fought with 
fire. It will be done, and done to the Queen's 
taste. It will be seen through to the end. Only, 
Never Again ! This seems to be the mood of 
the defenders of civilization. It is in contrast 
with that of the assaulters who already look for- 
ward to the "next war"; for, in their code, war 
is, in and of itself, a good thing. So far are they 
removed from the consensus of civilization. But 
the contemptible decadent who did not wor- 
ship "Gott" — unsern alten Gott — has, despite 
desperate initial handicaps, frustrated the deep- 
laid designs of Weltmacht, and has shown that, 
when it is inevitable, he can play the game he 
does not wish to play. Swift adaptation to the 
militancy that they did not love has characterized 
the industrial nations ; radical transformations of 
policy, as when America had recourse to the 
draft, have revealed an alertness in adaptation 
that no one suspected. Such radical means of 
adjustment could never have been put into opera- 
tion among a free people if that people — the 
common people, the masses — had not sensed the 



124 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

peril to civilization and the prospect of losing 
that which had made life on earth, especially 
life in America, worth living. Once sensed, the 
movement to repel the peril was as spontaneous 
as the rushing together of isolated frontiersmen 
to meet the menace of an Indian raid. 

I have said that it took overt acts to rouse the 
world's public opinion. It is not yet fully roused 
because by many these acts are not yet visualized. 
There are people who are deficient in imagination 
— in the power of visualization. They take in 
only dully and vaguely that which does not enter 
their minds by way of direct impression upon the 
senses. This is particularly true if their minds 
have been adjusted to altogether different sorts 
of things. Many an Englishman saw the light 
when he had viewed an air-raid, and had perhaps 
witnessed the mutilation of children and the 
despair of mothers. Frightfulness did not intimi- 
date him, but roused and infuriated him, when 
once he had met it face to face. Pacifists in this 
country would not hold out long in their fatuity 
if they were obliged, fast-bound, to witness the 
goatlike sex-orgies of the German oflBcer and 
soldier, particularly if the victims were of their 
own household. The man with imagination 
visualizes these horrors that shame the sun with 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 125 

tightening throat and implacable anger, and also 
with alarm. For there is nothing more invio- 
lable in American young womanhood, nor more 
appealing in American babies, than there was 
in French and Belgian and Polish girlhood and 
childhood. 

To the unimaginative in this country has come, 
however, a series of shocks : the submarine war- 
fare, the malevolence and duplicity of diplo- 
matic agents, the revelations of the Zimmermann 
note, the unbelievable disclosures of the spy 
system, the uncovering of malignant plotting of 
every sort. Some of these things have struck 
very near home — near enough to be visualized. 
The government has doled out authenticated 
items, from time to time, which seem to be but 
part of a larger store. Our people do not like 
war ; they hate it. But all but the traitors and 
the incurably light-minded want it now — want 
"this one more war to kill war," as some one has 
well put it. And the more they shall suffer from 
war, and fear and hate it, the keener will they be 
to win this one. The opponents of war, like the 
one-time hyphenated Americans, are not so nu- 
merous as they are noisy. We, like the English 
and French, are buckling down soberly as a 
nation to the Augean task of cleaning out the 



126 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

stables of central Europe, hoping to lay hand, 
at length, upon a Circe's rod that will turn the 
Saumensch into a human again. 

This is not militarism. It is militancy. We 
have been obliged to descend to the adversary's 
level, so far as to take up the gage from the ground 
upon which it was flung ; but war is no creed or 
" -ism " to the civilized nations now facing Ger- 
many and her henchmen. Civilized public opinion 
can never tolerate remaining on the German level 
except to fight the extension of the German code ; 
and that is why "Never Again" means a definite 
decision now. If there is no decision, then we 
may all have to stay upon that lower level so 
long, and to remain militant in such an increasing 
and desperate degree, that we may unlearn our 
anti-militarism. There is danger in an approach 
to militarism ; for it has a glamour, is seductive, 
and is attended by what Franklin called the "pest 
of glory." It is essential to the selection that the 
present war is effecting that we hold tight to the 
code of civilization while we are utterly destroying 
the rank growth that threatens it. It is this latter 
that must be spurlos versenkt, and quickly, too, 
I repeat ; for if the war lasts on for years, 
speedily recurs, or, because no definitive decision 
is reached, threatens and demands a huge defensive 



FORMATION OF A WORLD-OPINION 127 

organization, we shall run much risk of embracing 
the evil against which we are now embattled. 

This gathering public opinion of the world is 
going to make itself felt, not alone in war, but also, 
in ways peculiar to itself, when the war is over. 
To it Germany is already outside the pale of 
civilization ; and this war means, therefore, in a 
very real sense, no break-up at all, but a cause of 
strengthening and cohesion, for the international 
peace-group. Turkey's past performances have 
never been taken to indicate anything concerning 
the status of the international code ; she simply 
did not count in respect to that. And Ger- 
many ranks with Turkey, though infinitely more 
treacherous and dangerous. These birds of a 
feather are now snuggling harmoniously together 
on the same roost. Germany's case is that of a 
renegade movement against civilization by a 
professed member and supporter of the inter- 
national peace-group, who has secretly come to 
sneer at its code and has observed its forms in 
order the more securely to assault it. Expulsion 
from the group is the natural result. What that 
will mean during and after the war we can better 
judge, perhaps, when we have considered more 
generally the function, in societal evolution, of 
conflict by violence. 



XIII. SELECTION BY WAR 

The consideration of societal selection other 
than by war, though it has been treated not so 
much for itself as for its bearing upon war-selec- 
tion, has engaged us for some time ; it has been 
protracted because of the number of aspects which 
it presents, and because much light is thrown 
upon war-selection by reflecting somewhat care- 
fully and fully over the other and milder forms 
that have superseded war to such a wide extent. 
Peaceful selection is indeed the enlightened and 
evolved form upon which civilization has prided 
itself, and for which no excuses or disavowals ever 
need to be made. But now we have seen that 
it is too fine an instrument for the settlement of 
the major and essential issues, when the latter 
are challenged to the death. This sort of crisis 
calls for the primordial and elemental blood and 
iron. We come, then, to an examination of the 
methods and results of selection in the mores as 
effected by war. 

It has been noted that a " conflict of the mores " 
is a figure of speech ; the conflict is between the 

128 



SELECTION BY WAR 129 

adherents of the mores. If the adherents of one 
code are annihilated, selection has done its work 
in favor of the rival code. The simplest and 
most conclusive form of war-selection is therefore 
by annihilation. It was the primordial form, 
where there was no such thing as quarter. The 
Germans have practiced it in no small degree, 
and deliberately, not alone on the battle-field, 
but also in the prison-camp and the slave-quarters. 
To the legitimate methods and instruments of 
destruction in battle have been added gas and 
fire attacks and the dissemination of poison and 
disease. Once it was a thing to shudder at when 
one read of colonists leaving smallpox-infected 
garments where the Indians might find and use 
them ; it was incredibly inhuman and barbarous ; 
but now we are used to worse things and have 
even had to descend to them in self-defense. 
However, it is possible to contrast two striking 
expedients, the gas-apparatus, and the "tank,'* 
as significant of two divergent attitudes toward 
the proprieties of warfare. The former — and 
there might be added to this category the air- 
ship and submarine, as employed by Germany — 
represents a cruel and unusual instrumentality, 
while the latter is a perfectly legitimate variation 
on the instrumentalities recognized as allowable 



130 THROUGH WAE TO PEACE 

in civilized warfare. And as for the prisoners and 
non-combatants, the condition of the captured 
Germans should be compared with that of captives 
made by the Germans, or with that of the en- 
slaved Belgians who have been returned to their 
homes, at length, wrecked physically for life. It is 
clear enough that the Germans are not content 
with the toll of annihilation taken on the battle- 
field ; they have in mind no less than annihila- 
tion of any and all who stand in their way, and 
especially of the smaller nations. Belgium and 
Serbia have been systematically annihilated, in 
so far as was possible. 

It is characteristic of the Teutonic half-knowl- 
edge that such procedure is an outcome of ac- 
ceptance of the Darwinian theory. Germans 
have always been strong in applying theory from 
one field to matters of a quite different quality in 
another range ; it took Germans to work out in 
meticulous detail the analogy between a society 
and an organism, and finally come to identify the 
two. There is no need of writing a book, as 
Nasmyth ^ has done, to prove that Darwin coun- 
tenanced no such conclusions as have been drawn 
in his name ; even an elementary analysis re- 
veals the fact that organic and societal evolution 

^ "Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory." 



SELECTION BY WAR 131 

are effective each on its own plane, and according 
to its own mode, and not otherwise. But a swift 
snatch at the analogy was satisfactory to the 
German mind, especially since the crude con- 
clusions were in consonance with German mores. 
It remains true, however, that the most ef- 
fective societal selection is seciu'ed through anni- 
hilation of one of the contending codes, through 
the persons of its adherents. Doubtless most of 
the earliest and most determinative selections in 
the course of societal evolution came about in this 
manner. They are the ones that have lasted and 
have laid down the lines for the subsequent de- 
velopment of society. But, while war always 
implies partial annihilation, it came, after a while, 
to be restricted to that. When enough antago- 
nists had been killed to weaken the enemy's power 
of resistance, the rest were enslaved. Our interest 
in such enslavement lies only in the bearing upon 
selection of this alternative to annihilation. In 
the subjection here referred to, there is no idea of 
deliberately producing tuberculous human wrecks, 
that is, of enslaving with the purpose of annihila- 
tion at leisure ; the reference is to subjection by 
conquest, after which masters and slaves live side 
by side in the same society. In such a case there 
ensues a selection in the mores, but by no means 



132 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the prevalence of one code, even that of the 
masters, in its original lines. Rather is there 
mutual transmission of mores and a composite 
product. The result is a compounding of the 
two classes and of their interests, and, at length, 
a merging of their identity. This is the way 
states have formed. If, however, the masters 
exert unremitting pressure to extend their own 
code over the conquered, and will none of the 
other, the two social strata remain in open or 
latent hostility, as in Alsace, and refuse to amalga- 
mate, even under a combination of strenuous com- 
pulsion and occasional feigned complaisance. 

There can be no doubt that, if Germany were 
to win, there would be a farther and wider ex- 
hibition of what has occurred in her conquered 
provinces and in her so-called colonies. And that 
would mean that, sooner or later, there would be 
another conflict. No selection can be arrived at 
in such manner. Every one knows that Germany 
despaired of Germanizing Alsace-Lorraine except 
by executing or banishing the former inhabitants 
and filling their places with Germans — that is, 
by annihilation ; and in their tropical colonies the 
same insistence upon a code delivered to the 
chosen race by their Gott has resulted in almost 
unintermittent oppression of the natives and in 



SELECTION BY WAR 133 

recurrent revolts that have ushered in the better 
understood and better beloved method of selection 
by direct annihilation. 

But we need not analyze closely these two forms 
of selection, by annihilation and by subjugation 
and enslavement. We do not intend to use 
either of them. They are obvious enough, and 
if Germany prevails we shall have an opportunity 
of experiencing them in our own persons. They 
belong to the German mores, and are corollaries 
of the German code where they are not its major 
articles. When we are told that the Kaiser will 
stand no nonsense from America after the war, 
that is a threat of precisely the same mailed fist 
which has banged the council-tables of several 
decades, and has more recently smitten the con- 
quered and helpless victim. 

However, I feel under no constraint to believe 
or fear that the present war is about to issue in the 
survival of the German code, and so I shall con- 
fine myself to considering how the said conflict 
is going to eliminate that code. There is no 
prophecy here ; the massed public opinion of the 
world is a guarantee that the challenge to the 
code of civilization will not, in the end, prevail. 
There is no such change in the conditions of the 
race's life as to call for a retrogression. There is 



134 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

no possibility that societal evolution will turn 
back upon its course and land us again in ante- 
savagery. If the Germans prevail and we are 
thus reduced, it will be time enough then to ex- 
plain how it was done. This present war-selec- 
tion is here contemplated from the standpoint of 
civilization and its interests, with the hope of 
better understanding the massive process so that 
it may not be hindered but allowed to go on to 
its full fruition. Toward furthering this end we 
do not expect to employ either annihilation or 
subjugation of the German type, and so these 
processes and their results need not be further 
considered. 

The Allied nations could have used these 
methods. That is, in theory they could have done 
so. In practice they could not. This disability, 
due to adherence to the civilized code, left them 
at a considerable material disadvantage. Not 
only could they not wantonly kill, murder, or en- 
slave, but they also felt obliged to assist those who 
had been conquered and cold-bloodedly robbed 
by the adversary, and whom otherwise he would 
have enslaved or annihilated, or both. The 
Allies were even constrained by their code of 
humanity to help the enemy, or to buy him off 
from wholesale annihilation, by supplying Bel- 



SELECTION BY WAR 135 

gians, Poles, Armenians, and other conquered 
peoples with the means for living. It has been a 
heavy task to fight with honorable scruple against 
an unscrupulous and dishonorable foe. For more 
than three years American ears could hardly fail 
to hear the derisive mirth of the Teuton as he 
reached out his hand to profit by the, to him, con- 
temptible and decadent humanity of America. 
What would he have done? Why, the logical 
thing, of course. Fancy the German, if the case 
were reversed, assisting the enemy by feeding and 
clothing the population of a ravaged district. In 
our place he would have withheld all help from 
the Belgians and Armenians ; then the enemy 
could either have spent his resources in main- 
taining them, or have incurred the abhorrence of 
the world by letting them perish. A perfectly 
clear case of Realpolitik. But self-respect de- 
manded of the champions of civilization that, 
except where response in kind was clearly indi- 
cated as the sole measure of self-preservation, 
there should be no recourse to unsavory methods. 
Reprisals for air-raids have been delayed, even 
if they are to come at all ; reprisals on German 
prisoners for the miseries and broken bodies and 
spirits of French and English captives have not 
taken place. Doubtless, as to the savage, so to 



136 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the German, such scruples seem merely the evi- 
dence of weakness and even cowardice — in any 
case of decadence. Good old Gott could not 
countenance such soft procedure and must give 
the victory to his own true and hardy worshipers. 
It constitutes a real handicap, in such a conflict, 
to cherish such scruples. 

In general, then, the AUies are fighting in ac- 
cord with their civilized code; if there is a con- 
quest by them, there will be no annihilation or 
enslavement of the conquered. It is not that 
the adversary is not bad enough, but that "we 
are too good." Indeed, the cause for concern is 
quite other, namely, that there will be a mistaken 
magnanimity, a tendency to let bygones be by- 
gones and start again, a willingness to regard the 
criminal as repentant and reformed, if he says he 
is — and then turn him loose on the world again. 
This, as we shall see, will mean another war just 
as soon as Germany has recovered; nothing 
could stop that except remaining armed to the 
teeth, and squandering the fruits of industry 
upon unproductive devices for destruction. Unless 
Germany were to renounce her code. Of course 
that is the essential — that that code shall be re- 
nounced. But how can that come about if there 
is to be no annihilation or subjection with control ? 



SELECTION BY WAR 137 

From the beginning there has been but one ef- 
fective agency that has led men to change their 
ways : discomfort amounting to suffering and 
productive of disillusionment. If an individual is 
miserable enough, he will overhaul his mode of 
life ; if a society suffers sufficiently, it will at 
length question its code. The more successful the 
code has been, or has seemed to be, in the past — 
the more inveterate the belief in it — the slower 
will the awakening be. The case before us is, 
then, a hard one ; for the German people have 
had their code so exalted before them, both bla- 
tantly and subtly, from babyhood up, that they 
are incapable, even under great provocation, of 
criticizing it. They are apparently incurably 
docile, and unwilling to form or incapable of form- 
ing an independent public opinion. This means 
that there is no use trying to reason with them 
— not yet. It means that they must suffer much 
before they will question, let alone give up, their 
ways. 

It is, then, the line of action for the Allies to 
make them suffer much, and resolutely to turn a 
deaf ear to their rulers' calculating proposals to 
end the conflict, until there shall have appeared 
unmistakable fruits meet for repentance. Pro- 
tests are of no further avail, while the code is held ; 



138 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

after it is renounced, it can be reasoned about — 
not before. The fate of naivete in this matter is 
being illustrated for us all by the Bolsheviki, 
There can be no compromise or reconciliation 
between the German code and the code we are 
engaged in defending, as I have sufficiently 
demonstrated above. The security of an inter- 
national peace-group is out of the question until 
this challenge to the international code has been 
eliminated. 

There is, I have said, no intention of annihilat- 
ing or enslaving the German nation. To try to 
do that would be to lend adherence to that course 
of conduct which has ostracized Germany from 
the concourse of civilized peoples. Mere military 
victory, by itself, can no more than quell the 
present attempt upon the code of civilization. 
Unless that victory comes about, nothing else can 
be done ; but if it is not followed up by altera- 
tions and adjustments of the German code by 
the German people, no profound and definitive 
selection will have taken place. Adjustment 
along the lines of the international code, to be 
effective and lasting, must come from within. 
Just how may war result in this inner alteration 
of the mores ? 



XIV. GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 

Any nation's code is its prosperity-policy, and 
is clung to because of the conviction that it is an 
expedient and a winning policy in living. The 
Germans think that their militarism or Prussian- 
ism is a winning policy. They have seen some 
of the advantages which they have gained by 
it ; and they have been adjured, since they were 
able to understand anything, to remember that 
their undoubted prosperity was due to the mili- 
tarist regime of the Hohenzollerns. That is 
doubtless the conviction of most Germans. ''Das 
kanonenfeste Deutschland " has long been paraded 
before a sentimental and suggestible people, not 
too well endowed with a sense of the ridiculous. 
The "shining armor" and other stage-properties 
dazzle their eyes. There dangles before their 
minds a conception of the State as a sort of divine 
entity, invincible, and personified in the ruling 
dynasty, by whose benevolent, paternal, unerring, 
and resolute action they have been made the 
greatest of nations and the world's hope. This 

139 



140 THROUGH WAR TOlPEACE 

has become an obsession with them and is cor- 
relative with the contempt, clumsily veiled or 
grossly exposed, which they feel for other nations. 
It renders possible the incredibly fatuous ex- 
pressions of their public men, authors, and preach- 
ers. I do not need to cite illustrations of this 
colossal national self-satisfaction ; Archer ^ and 
others have compiled typical specimens. 

The authorities, themselves at least partially 
auto-hypnotized by this same grandiose vision, 
have worked on fertile soil. It goes without the 
saying that they could not have raised the crop 
they have raised upon other ground, say in France 
or England. The situation, that is, is not re- 
ferable to a single individual or group of indi- 
viduals, but to the automatic development of 
a typical national character and code. The 
sophisticated leaders, above all Bismarck, re- 
peatedly took advantage, sometimes with a candid 
cynicism, of the ground prepared for them. The 
German people are fetish-worshipers, and their 
fetishes are the government and especially the 
army. The creed that forms the rallying-point 
for all their adulations is militarism. Their god 
is at best the Yahweh that incited the peoples of 
old to smite the rival nation hip and thigh, with- 

1 "Gems of German Thought." 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 141 

out mercy, where he is not Odin or Thor of the 
Hammer. Though Germany has been nominally 
Christian, not much has been heard of the New 
Dispensation. 

This militarist religion is the sanction of mili- 
tarist mores and supports them at every turn. It 
too has been tested up and found, in the German 
view, expedient and good. Only a powerful 
divinity could have presided over the demon- 
strated prosperity of the Empire. Witness the 
seizure of a million square miles of colonies, with 
a population of ten millions, accomplished within 
a year and from under the very nose of astonished 
England. Witness the German conquest of the 
world-market, engineered by astute state pa- 
ternalism. Witness the flocking of the nations to 
Germany in quest of knowledge and science at 
their source. It was without a sense of incon- 
sistency that all German literature, art, and music 
were referred to the same great fetish : Goethe 
and Beethoven, they too were children of the war- 
god and exponents of the absurd "will-to-power" 
— discrepancies of an historical and biographical 
nature being irrelevant and negligible in the face 
of so blinding a revelation of national superhuman 
superiority. Why should a nation not believe 
utterly in a code, or a prosperity-policy, that 



142 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

could produce all this and more? There were 
plenty of local magi who could prove indisputably 
what they all wanted to believe. Nowhere else 
has the truth of the saying that the raison d'etre 
of the human mind consists in the fact that it can 
always find good and sufficient reason for doing 
what its possessor wants to do, received more 
triumphant vindication than in Germany. 

No wonder the German felt aggrieved, con- 
temptuous, and at length enraged, because he 
was not understood by other nations. With a 
divine compassion Eucken writes : "Our German 
Kultur has, in its unique depth, something shrink- 
ing and severe ; it does not obtrude itself, or 
readily yield itself up ; it must be earnestly 
sought after and lovingly assimilated from within. 
This love was lacking in our neighbors ; where- 
fore they easily came to look upon us with the 
eyes of hatred." You must first accept the 
German code blindly and then you come, as one 
of the faithful, to comprehend its serene beauty. 
So might a paranoiac remark to a sane man who 
could not share his illusions, but was somewhat 
uneasy on the matter of personal safety in their 
presence. This is precisely the way fanatics al- 
ways talk about their religions : believe first ; 
don't think, weigh, and reflect. This revelation 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 143 

may seem to be contrary to knowledge and sense ; 
it is really not contrarj^ to these, but above them. 
This is the time-honored "doctrine of mystery." 

Now this simple and childlike faith is what 
sanctions any and all departments of the German 
mores. By it the national code is transformed 
into a revelation. The mores, by themselves, 
can make anj'thing right or wrong ; and a 
supernatural sanction can add to these attributes 
so as to make anything also holy or sacrilegious. 
Thus a holy joy may attend upon the sinking of 
a Lusitania ; and a fanatical Hassgesang and a 
Gott strafe ! may be launched at a nation 
whose action, however motived, crosses the 
German will in the form of an impiety sure to be 
divinely punished. It is all very ridiculous and 
even imbecile in its preposterous solemnity ; no 
wonder Tommy causes Fritz to intone the Hymn 
of Hate, and joins uproariously in the chorus. 
Such a show has never been dreamt of before and 
will not come soon again. It confirms all the 
impressions derived from Punch and elsewhere, 
which the Germans have so deeply resented, as to 
Teutonic outlandishness. 

But now it is characteristic of a godlet like him 
of the Germans that he invariably "makes good." 
He has to, for there is, in his portentous solemnity. 



144 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

no room for weakness or fallings-short. We 
gentile and un-chosen peoples can make allow- 
ances for our pet fetishes, such as the "people," 
and even joke at them a little, for we do not take 
them with such owl-like seriousness. Lese-ma- 
jeste has never bothered us very much. We have 
no divinely anointed One who is vulnerable and 
even sensitive to criticism, and who issues pro- 
nunciamentos, out of questionable inspiration, on 
religion, art, music, and all the rest. Also we 
have no statesmen, or even theologians, who will 
meekly recant in the face of a revelation vouch- 
safed by the mouth of authority. We have here 
no super-men, officially in the confidence of the 
Deity. One of us is just as likelj^ to get a revela- 
tion as another. We could laugh appreciatively 
at an "7c/i und Gott" poem, even if it were written 
in derision of our pet statesman. No, we are not 
reverent in the Teutonic way. It is no wonder 
that our comprehension of Kultur leaves much to 
be desired. 

But, as I said, the German fetish must make 
good. He always does, even if it takes a special 
revelation to interpret some of his doings as suc- 
cess. He inspires to Hindenburg victories, after 
securing treason in the enemy's War Office, not 
reporting that the adversaries had only crow-bars 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 145 

to fight with. And then he breathes into the 
spirit-receptive mind of the generahssimo the 
master-conception of a victorious retreat. He is 
a curious conducting medium for information 
from the outside world ; for out there too the 
will-to-power is never balked. England is already 
starved out ; the American soldiers cannot get 
across the ocean ; presently the Sioux Indians 
will take New York — what is Mr. Dooley doing 
with his opportunities these days ? If one marvels 
that a trustful and devout people can be so taken 
in, let him reflect upon the skill with which the 
rest of the world, and even of the suspicious and 
hostile world, has been overreached. The German 
system has made pretty good, so far as actual ac- 
complishment goes, even in the eyes of those who 
would like to discredit it; this is ruefully ad- 
mitted, although there is no desire to emulate its 
methods. What must it not enjoy of reputation 
amidst a worshipful people to whom it is uni- 
formly and overwhelmingly successful and who 
are not critical of its methods or its reports ? 

Is a people so worshipful, and at the same time 
so sure of the divine potency of its leadership, 
going to revolt with no provocation ? Not much. 
Is the dusky beneficiary going to throw over his 
old Mumbo Jumbo while the going is good and 



146 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

while the priest stands by to explain any ap- 
parent lapses, or even, by some wily hocus-pocus, 
to lend to real misfortune the appearance of divine 
beneficence ? What is a little suffering, with such 
prospects, such ends, and such a world-mission in 
plain view? The grumblers or critics are sacri- 
legious; they can be ignored or jailed. All 
great world-reforms demand sacrifice and steadi- 
ness of faith. The devotion of the German people 
to an unworthy and a losing cause is truly pa- 
thetic, but there is no doubt about its uninformed 
sincerity. This national devotion was grossly 
underestimated at first ; there has been the same 
sort of disillusionment in this matter as there was 
concerning the essentially kindly and humane 
character of the people. Some of us hoped for a 
protest of the people against the atrocities of the 
army and navy, but there was, rather, a rejoicing 
among them and a pious satisfaction as of the 
saved viewing from the crystal battlements the 
lot of the damned. So that, although the reform 
of German ways must come from within, we have 
ceased to expect it so soon. As long as the present 
governmental system and methods are in opera- 
tion, it is hardly possible to get the plain facts 
known by Germans, let alone interpreted from 
an unbiased and non-fantastic point of view. 



GERMAN FETISH-WORSHIP 147 

The avenues, temporal and spiritual, for the 
transmission of other mores are closed. 

There is no present utility (though there may be 
a prospective one) in telling a fanatical people 
that we are not fighting them, but their prepos- 
session and religion. Fancy announcing to a 
Mohammedan that we are not contending against 
him, but against the Prophet and all his works. 
So long as the Germans fervently believe in their 
fetish, they will hug it to them the more closely, 
especially if it begins to whine or bluster about the 
impiety of those who would put asunder what 
"our good old God" had joined irrevocably to- 
gether. There is not much use to rain down facts 
and tracts out of aeroplanes ; they are " English 
lies." The case of the Germans is a refractory 
one and will not yield to such milder means any 
more than it did, preceding war, to diplomatic 
representations and concessions. Then, they 
thought, the Day of vindication was at hand; 
now that Day is here ; and there is as yet no 
serious doubt that it will bring what was prom- 
ised for it. How foolish to falter when success 
is right at hand ! 

It is probable that the sufferings of some of 
Germany's vassals have not been sanctified unto 
them as part of a grandiose vindication of the 



148 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

fetish. M. Andre Cheradame ^ thinks that at 
least sections of the nations which Germany has 
"burglarized," under the guise of alliance, are ripe 
for a change of heart, and argues for an attempt to 
enlighten them as to the issues at stake — at stake 
not only for the world, but for themselves as well. 
He thinks that the projected Pan-Germany may 
thus explode from within. His ideas seem reason- 
able, for the insulating effect of the German ob- 
session does not seem to have reached to the 
Czechs and other Slavic and otherwise alien races 
of the Dual Empire. Their severe sufferings and 
misgivings are not interpretable by the faith, as 
sacrifices to a cause, and a little propaganda 
might do much. It might, thinks this writer, 
pave the way for a decisive German defeat. 
Therein lies its promise ; for there is no way out 
of this crucible of selection except through that 
eventuality. 

1 "How to Destroy Pan-Germany," in the Atlantic Monthly for 
December, 1917. 



XV. THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE 
FETISH 

The Germans will endure pain and sacrifice 
without losing their patience or docility, so long as 
they are not disillusioned. I have said that their 
godlet has made good — or that they are convinced 
that he has, which amounts to the same thing. 
But suppose he fails so egregiously that there 
is no concealment or interpretation of the fact 
possible, and no method adequate to demonstrate 
that he has, after all, won out, or will certainly do 
so. Suppose that strategic and victorious retreats 
bring the ark back into Germany itself. Suppose 
that the army is actually, and undeniably, and even 
admittedly defeated, and the government over- 
thrown. Suppose the loot of Belgium and the 
other conquests has to be assembled and restored, 
and the wantonness of destruction paid for. And 
suppose, along with such happenings, the German 
people finally learn the unadorned truth : that 
England is not starved out, that American soldiers 
are really in Europe, and so on — and above all 
the truth as to how the world's opinion stands re- 
garding them. Suppose that they learn that, in- 

149 



150 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

stead of being admired, envied, and feared, they 
are the objects of contempt, loathing, and bitter 
resentment. 

Here would be wholesale disillusionment. And 
here would be, in addition to the former sufferings 
— then sanctified and offered on the altar, now, 
in retrospect, bearing a different semblance — fore- 
bodings of another and more racking torture, 
that of living by tolerance in a world empty of 
friends. Once it was England and America that 
were to write off all the conqueror's obligations ; 
now it is the conquered who must pay their own, 
and indemnity besides. No people has ever viewed 
a more waste and dreary future than will the Ger- 
mans on the morrow of defeat. On all sides people 
who have lost by their action property, comfort, 
peace of mind, their dearest ones — not to mention 
those who have been actually oppressed and en- 
slaved and whose life-treasures have been preyed 
upon by the orgy of murderousness and lust. All 
about them peoples who make no account of their 
word of honor and who have come to regard 
"German" as synonymous with all that is dis- 
honorable, treacherous, and beastly. 

Many people do not wish their children to study 
the German language, and there is already a move- 
ment on foot to exclude it from the public schools 



THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 151 

of this country. There is more than a suspicion 
that hospitality to the language, in the past, has 
been treacherously abused, to sow discord within 
the nation ; and that not alone through the Ger- 
man press, but also through the school-books, with 
their everlasting laudation of the German fetish. 
In fact, whether or not the character of text-books 
in German has been deliberately manipulated — 
and it is not at all unbelievable, in the light of 
what we have come to know — the prevailing 
fetish-worship cannot but come out in such pub- 
lications. It comes out, sad to say, even when 
the authors are not Germans. To one who 
hates what Germany stands for, it is revolting 
to see the pictures and read the legends that 
are characteristic of German primers ; for they 
reek of the unclean thing. This revulsion goes 
even farther. A man has admired and loved Ger- 
man literature of the earlier and cleaner period, 
and in particular, let us say, Goethe's master-work. 
He knows Goethe's attitude to be Prussian in no 
respect.^ He recalls that Goethe could not write 

^ In a conversation with Eckermann, in March, 1828, Goethe 
deplores the repression of the German youth, contrasting the system 
that makes them " prematurely tame " with the English " Gliick 
der personlichen Freiheit." The conversation is too long to be re- 
produced here, but I cannot refrain from giving one extract. 

" Es darf kein Bube mit der Peitsche knallen, oder singen, oder 



152 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

war-songs, much less Hymns of Hate, because 
he could not hate his spiritual benefactors. And 
yet this man cannot now read Faust and the 
rest without offense. Sckrecklich, let us say, 
occurs on this page, and what is the image 
it summons up ? Here is a scene of peasant 
Gemiitlichkeit, and one recalls that he derived 
his original impression, now shattered, from such 
sources. The lusts of Walpurgisnacht — have they 
not come to earth ? The very words are offen- 
sive now — for how long, one cannot say. May 
this soon pass ! But were the poet's lines not 
prophetic ? 

"Weh! Weh! 
Du hast sie zerstort. 
Die schone Welt, 
Mit machtiger Faust ; 
Sie stiirzt, sie zerfjillt ! 
Ein Halbgott hat sie zerschlagen ! 
Wir tragen 

Die Triimmern ins Nichts hiniiber 
Und klagen 
Ueber die verlorne Schone." 

rufen, sogleich ist die Polizei da, es ihm zu verbieten. Es geht bei 
uns alles dahin, die liebe Jugend friihzeitig zahm zu machen und 
alle Natur, alle Originalitat und alle Wildheit auszutreiben, sodass 
am Ende nichts iibrigbleibt als der Philister." 



THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 153 

Even in trade there will be an attitude different 
from the generous one encountered by Germans 
while yet they were profiting so successfully in the 
peaceful competition, enjoying the reality of the 
"free seas" for which they have lately clamored, 
and the host of other advantages accorded by an 
enlightened world to a respected and eflBcient com- 
petitor. Now it is seen that Germany is not, in 
any sense of the term, a "good sport," and still 
less a good loser ; for, while succeeding notably, 
she was willing to break the rules of the game and 
make a gross assault upon any and all competitors 
that were succeeding in any degree. It is the old 
and obsolete ideal of world-monopoly that has ani- 
mated her. But now some of Germany's enemies 
have learned, under necessity, to supply for them- 
selves needs that only Germany could formerly 
meet ; they do not need Germany any more. 
Among other disservices that she has wrought to 
the world, Germany has apparently demonstrated 
the necessity of national economic self-sufficiency, 
and so has contributed to put off the day when ar- 
tificial barriers to freedom of trade will be a thing 
of the past. This is a part of the damage done to 
civilization which is not often mentioned, but it is 
a very real one. Some of her fellow-nations will 
not need Germany, I have said ; and there will be 



154 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

others which do not want her, because they have 
learned to suspect and disHke her. Who does 
business gladly with even a reformed pirate? 

It is said that Germany must be powerless or 
free — meaning, as we take it here, free, first of all, 
of her obsession. It is the contention here that 
if she is rendered powerless by being conquered, 
she will become free ; but that she has little or no 
chance of becoming free until she is decisively de- 
feated. The obsession with the fetish acts as a 
sort of shell or insulation for the mores, rendering 
them inaccessible to outside influences and thus 
impairing their power of adaptation to conditions 
which they do not sense. The mores are thus not 
sensitive to environment ; they are stunted in the 
matter of variation, and the wholesome action of 
selection is impaired. They are in a condition 
designated by zoologists as "spinescence." The 
first need, for better adjustment, is to strip off the 
insulation, thus invading the isolation ; and to 
open before the mores a real, in place of an imagi- 
nary or constructed environment. This can be 
done only by the defeat of the supposedly in- 
vincible armies and the demonstration that mili- 
tarism is not the master-key to the national and 
international destiny. It is when Mumbo Jumbo 
fails to make good that they take him out and beat 



THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 155 

him, or even pitch him into the river. A peace 
without victory could be too variously and in- 
geniously interpreted by interested parties ; it 
would mean the persistence of the obsession and 
its further manifestations of uncivilized conduct 
in international affairs. It would mean at least 
uneasiness in the world for decades to come. 

There are those who cry out against such a con- 
clusion, asserting that force never settles any- 
thing ; that war is uniformly bad and has never 
brought about good results. People who really be- 
lieve this are as impervious to reason and fact as 
the Germans themselves ; only a demonstration 
in which they personally figure can enlighten them. 
But there are others who thoughtlessly repeat 
such foolish assertions ; and perhaps they are 
worth spending words upon. Such assertions 
represent sentimentality, not sense. War is like 
all the rest of human things : not all good, nor yet 
all bad, but mixed. It has done much in the past 
that nothing else could have accomplished ; it is 
now performing before us a selection not otherwise 
to be hoped for. I do not care to argue an obvious 
case, and so leave the generalities about the good 
and evil of war with these few remarks and the im- 
plications of my general argument. But as to 
force never accomplishing anything, that too is 



156 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

the nonsense of a fanatical utterance. Force has 
underlain all of the institutions upon which civi- 
lization has most prided itself : the family, law, 
government, rights, morals, and religion. How 
was the decision gotten over piracy, or slavery, or 
any other outworn practice that by its persistence 
constituted a menace to civilization ? By arguing 
and passing a resolution ? By tearful expostula- 
tion, or even by prayer .f* How did we get our 
national independence and start the infection of 
modern democracy ? By moral suasion ? It takes 
a conflict to secure selection and the survival of 
the fit, I repeat, in the societal range as in the or- 
ganic ; and the more vital the issue, the surer it is 
that that conflict will come down to the ultimate, 
violent, physical form. If one wants to maintain 
that an issue must be settled by appeal to reason, 
then the answer is that both parties must see 
reason. There is no argument in the presence 
of homicidal mania except that of force and the 
strait-jacket. It is a pity that this is so, but it is 
no less so because it is a pity. So is it a pity that 
a baby, leaning too far out of a window, will fall 
to its death ; but shall we pass a resolution against 
gravitation ? It is a pity, but yet it is a fact, that 
some people, especially if obsessed, will not see 
reason any more than an excited and overwrought 



THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 157 

child will, until the exuberance of their unreason 
is reduced by punishment. The strained nerves 
are discharged. Then they are fit to be reasoned 
with, and not before. It is then that they become 
capable of seeing the light. 

England saw the light, not from Burke's ex- 
postulations but after her war with us, and has 
developed an astonishing capacity, out of the 
maladroitness of the "colonial system " for ruling 
peoples. The South saw the light, after the Civil 
War, and would no more go back to slavery now 
than would the North. The Boers have seen the 
light. The days of the Oom Pauls are over. No 
grander conception of the mission and destiny of 
the British Empire as an enlightened peace-group 
was ever voiced than that of a former Boer com- 
mander and man of vision,^ now one of the bul- 
warks of that Empire's Council. 

And here before us is an issue, which, as I have 
remarked, dwarfs into insignificance any other 
that the race has met. There has been no lack of 
attempts to settle it by way of peaceful means, 
and they have one and all failed. It has come 
down to a matter of force, of killing, and of misery- 
making, and it must issue in decisive military de- 
feat for the Germans if there is to be peace in the 

1 J. C. Smuts, " The British Commonwealth of Nations." 



158 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

world and an extension of international relations 
of amity. All those who hate force and war can 
help to eliminate them, and also to shorten present 
suffering, by putting all their powers into the effort 
to reach the decision at the earliest possible 
moment. 

It is not a question of annihilating or enslaving 
Germany, as she would like to do to the rest of us. 
She expects that, doubtless, judging us by herself. 
It is a question of eradicating her fetish-worship 
by demonstrating that her idols have feet of clay. 
Nothing but defeat of the invincible army and 
government, and the consequent letting-in of light 
as to the world's opinion of her course can do that. 
If this is accomplished, she can make her own selec- 
tion, by revolution or otherwise. This is a tre- 
mendous task, but there is no other way of getting 
the results. The German government has been 
prodigal of promises, concealments, and lies to 
cover partial failures. The people have trusted 
it implicitly. After defeat there will be no more 
opportunity to conceal or deceive, and the past, 
present, and prospective suffering of the people 
will cause them to ask : Who got us into this, and 
why ? If the revulsion is sharp enough, the fact of 
maladjustment to the conditions of life in the world 
will be sufficiently evident in the national loss 



THE ONE WAY TO UPSET THE FETISH 159 

and pain. In such case there will be no desire to 
return to the gods that have led into nothing but 
desperate calamity. The first accounting in such 
a case is not with the mores, but with the false 
leaders; and with the autocracy and militarism 
will go, unless the Germans are malevolent by 
nature, in the very germ-plasm, that obsession and 
insulation which have drugged sensitiveness to en- 
vironment and thus prevented adjustment along 
modern lines. 

The process of selection, to be effective, is bound 
to be painful. It is an operation where, if there is 
faltering at the end, there might as well have been 
no cutting at all. To this point I shall return. 
But it is to be recalled that Germany is in the posi- 
tion, among nations, of a criminal outlaw among 
his fellow-men. It helps the wrong-doer to get on 
the right track if he is obliged to repair the damage 
he has done. The thief cannot be allowed, even 
in his own interest, to keep his plunder subsequent 
to his conversion. When the Allied spokesman 
demanded reparation, restitution, and guarantees, 
he was calling for precisely those things which are 
best for Germany, as well as due her victims. In- 
sistence upon these demands is indispensable. 
Much there is that Germany must pay for, in years 
to come — through the contempt and dislike of the 



160 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

world — for they cannot be atoned for in terms of 
material things, and no one who is civilized wants 
to see retaliation in kind. But what she can repair 
and restore she should be held to repair and restore 
to the last item. 

I have said that nothing but a military victory 
will do. That is because I can see no other way 
to upset the fetish, strip off the insulation, and 
thus expose the German mores to the necessity 
of adjustment. The sine qua non is the fall of 
the fetish. If that can be accomplished in some 
other way that shall be decisive and definitive, 
well and good. Nevertheless whatever the nature 
of the last push that displaces the tottering struc- 
ture, military force will have been an indis- 
pensable factor; and any alternative way can 
scarcely be less terrible. 



XVI. ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 

When the war began there were not a few of us 
who saw the issue as a local thing. Desperate 
efforts were being made to locahze it. Only later 
did it appear that the very essence of civilization 
was challenged, and that the warnings of Washing- 
ton about European entanglements were irrelevant 
to an issue that transcended any continent or hemi- 
sphere. Some saw this after the rush through 
Belgium, others after the Lusitania episode ; but 
it was over two years before public opinion, in this 
relatively remote land, had sensed the danger suf- 
ficiently to support armed intervention. 

Similarly slow has been the comprehension of 
the strength and system of preparedness of the 
enemy. It was incredible that he would do what 
he did in the line of atrocities ; and it was also in- 
credible that he had been working out his code and 
preparing so long and so successfully. Even now, 
with not a little bitter experience behind us, we 
are from day to day amazed and shocked at the 

161 



162 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

exhibitions of unscrupulous efficiency that are 
being revealed to us. It is easy enough to blame 
some one else, especially some one in power whom 
we do not like, for not appreciating the whole situa- 
tion beforehand ; but it is graceless to charge any 
ruler of a civilized nation with sloth or cowardice 
because his mind was not attuned to take in the 
bearings of what he had to be brought by hard 
experience to believe at all. If there had been 
another Kaiser at Washington, very likely he 
would have had a mind attuned to the situation as 
an American's was not. Even Mr. Roosevelt was 
not attuned — the more credit to him. Yet he 
writes, in the very fury of his objurgation of the 
Administration for not being expert in militarism : 
"I delight in the fact that when we entered this 
war we were not, like our adversary, ready for it, 
anxious for it, prepared for it, and inviting it. 
Accustomed to peace, we were not ready." 
"The overwhelming majority of American peo- 
ple," comments Professor Sherman,^ "will per- 
fectly understand that utterance and sympathize 
with it. In exactly the same sense the English 
people, in the midst of a tremendous emergency, 
have very generally pointed, with a kind of tragic 

1 "Why Mr. Roosevelt and the Rest of Us Are at War," in the 
New York Nation for November 15, 1917. 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 163 

pride and joy, to the fact that they were not pre- 
pared, as the irrefutable evidence of their pacific 
intentions and as the substantial vindication of 
their honor in the community of nations." 

This military unpreparedness, however, though 
we may rightly be proud of it and of the spirit be- 
hind it, has represented for us the same sort of 
handicap that an unarmed and peaceful citizen 
labors under when he is suddenly obliged to en- 
counter a desperado with a blackjack. We are 
finding that out. German efl&ciency has never 
been as great or as thorough as in the present 
struggle ; that is no wonder, for it has put its best 
for decades into preparation against "The Day." 
At first it looked like an unequal contest, with such 
a preponderance of nations and numbers on the 
Allied side ; but that the inequality lay in the 
other direction speedily became apparent. It will 
never cease to amaze most of us that the Germans 
did not at once take Paris ; we are almost ready 
to credit the tale that it was their gluttony and 
thirst for French champagne that defeated them. 
And much of the initial advantage still remains — 
above all the centralization of control. The Allies 
have admittedly made error after error, where the 
enemy has made but few. This is natural enough, 
for, as we now know, the Allies were to the Ger- 



164 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

mans as a novice in an odious trade to an enthu- 
siastic devotee of the same. 

Except for the British navy. For the German 
naval programs and performances had been ob- 
served by the Admiralty, viewed with concern, 
protested against, and at length met with counter- 
preparation. Here the German menace had been 
taken seriously and the defenses strengthened. 
But it was defense only that was contemplated ; 
as a matter of fact, the British navy has come to 
be one of the most powerful factors making for 
peace and freedom that the world has known, and 
it has been, in this war, the very bulwark of civi- 
lization. Germany points at British navalism 
as identical with the militarism charged to her; 
but the character of the one differs from that of 
the other by reason of the spirit in which the arm 
of power is used or designed to be used. There is 
no fetish about British navalism, if it is pleasing 
to call it that. There is really no -ism or doctrine. 
The doctrine behind German militarism is now 
clearly enough revealed; but there is as little of 
that sort of dogma in British navalism as behind 
our new American militancy. Either may lead 
to an -ism if the nation in question becomes suffi- 
ciently obsessed and retrogressive; but there is 
as yet no British or American tendency toward 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 165 

beating with the heated and unbalanced head in 
the dust before the fetish-stool. 

The initial lack of preparedness is being rapidly 
overcome. Says one of the Cabinet officers : 
"A democracy making war is never an agreeable 
sight, for it is not in its normal line of life. And 
those who sneer or jeer because it does not play 
the game as well as might be, pay an unconscious 
compliment to the merits of free institutions. It 
takes time to accustom men to the short, hard 
words of command, and to the surrender of per- 
sonal judgment. It is not easy, either, for a nation 
to turn its back upon the conception of a world 
where justice works out its ends by quiet pro- 
cesses, and in its stead come to the stern belief that 
the ultimate court is a battlefield. So, if there is 
wrenching and side-slipping and confusion, there 
should be no surprise. The surprise to me has 
been with what comparative ease the transition 
has been made, and how much unconscious prepa- 
ration for the new work had been already made." 
It is remarkable that democracies where freedom 
of opinion makes for diffusion, have adjusted them- 
selves so rapidly and effectively to unexpected and 
poorly understood conditions. It simply goes to 
show the adaptability of a public opinion unused 
to direction and repression. A nation which has 



166 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

faced for generations toward production and 
peace must now aim at destruction and war. It 
is no slight task to swing the massive engine 
about. It takes time to beat the plow-share into 
a sword and to make of a professional producer an 
expert destroyer. But there is another thing that 
is still harder to do, and that is to steel the 
hearts of humane men of peace against prema- 
ture pity and softening; to have them hold 
relentlessly to the noisome task until it is done 
for good and all ; to have no faltering before or at 
the finish. 

Our adversaries have no such prospect to cause 
them concern ; no hearts need to be steeled 
against human pity. We are, again, plainly at a 
material disadvantage. It is we, not the adver- 
sary, who have lost precious lives by humanity 
and chivalry. Our foes do not mind crying 
"Kamerad !" and then opening ranks for the hid- 
den machine-guns to play upon the unsuspecting. 
It is they who will try, in straits, to net us by plau- 
sible duplicity, to our destruction. We do not 
want to practice any of these things ; we are too 
proud to fight in that way ; but we must not be 
taken in any more by reason of our humane im- 
pulses. 

Particularly do we Americans run the risk of 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 167 

insisting foolishly and ignorantly upon stopping 
the conflict before selection is accomplished. Not 
a few of us seem to be impressed by the Russian 
formula of "No annexations and no indemni- 
ties." It is a fair guess that that formula origi- 
nated in a German head. What is happening in 
Russia as the result of fantastic and Utopian 
procedures ought to give even a sentimentalist 
pause. The trouble, as I have said, is the in- 
capacity of many people for visualization of 
actualities not right at hand. Such persons are 
bleared as to the mind's eye. All right-minded 
men want the war to stop ; but they want it to 
stay stopped. The only important question is as 
to how soon it can stop, on condition that it shall 
satisfy justice, perform its selection, and so stop 
for good. How soon can "Never Again!" in 
the matter of this great issue, be transformed from 
a fervent purpose into an assured reality .f* 

Now, what some of us fear, in connection with 
this "no-indemnities" suggestion, is that certain 
sentimentalists, by raising a rhythmic clamor that 
shall beat intolerably upon the ears of a tired 
world, will succeed in staying the hand of justice 
in the matter of restitution, reparation, and 
guarantees ; and thus operate to prevent the 
cleaning-up of this whole job in workmanlike 



168 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

style.^ Presumably such a movement will not 
originate in Belgium, or France, or, indeed, among 
any other of the victims of Germany's barbarities ; 
nor yet among those who have been near enough 
to see and know, and to experience righteous in- 
dignation. It will be among the ethical theorists 
whose phantasms have not been tested by reference 
to fact, and who can voice a lofty magnanimity 
from a protected station. 

Of all the Allies, we Americans are farthest re- 
moved from a realization of what the Germans 
have planned and done. Even the French have 
felt that they must keep an account of the details 
of German ferocity against the day of settlement. 
Over here we do not know even by hearsay — 
least of all have we yet experienced — the bar- 
barities which the French are afraid they may 
forget, as the weariness grows more mortal and 
the sensibilities are dulled through the long months 
of trials and efforts. But now we shall have a 
weighty voice in the settlement of things. And 
if the end should come before we experience the 
losses and the heart-ache, we shall be too likely 
to minimize the wantonnesses committed against 

^ The rest of this chapter is derived, with insignificant alteration , 
from a letter of the author, entitled "On Faltering at the Finish," in 
the New York Nation for June 7, 1917. 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 169 

others, and shall perhaps wish to conclude the 
task without bringing it to a finish. Some of us 
will harp on the familiar sentiment that the 
criminal is not responsible, that punishment 
should not be vindictive, that severity never acts 
as a deterrent ; others will appeal to the chivalry 
that will not strike the opponent when he is down. 
A number of people will want to be content with 
the treatment of symptoms, and to neglect the 
extirpation of the lurking disease. Other scruples 
will appear which do more credit to the heart 
than to the head. And then, if the evil is not 
resolutely cut out, it will resume its growth and 
the suffering and loss will have to be incurred 
again, in more disastrous form, later on. 

The distinction between hostility to the German 
government and that toward the German people 
will again be drawn. It is risky to make a dis- 
tinction of this kind. The issue is not, at bottom, 
hostility to any persons ; it is reprobation of what 
the persons stand for. But there is no doubt, 
as we have said, that the German people. Social- 
ists and all, have stood for what the German 
government and armies have done. They have 
been deceived, no doubt; but the responsibility 
for that cannot rest elsewhere than on themselves. 
They have been dominated by a fetish ; but they 



170 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

bent gladly in their adulation. If they were 
merely in error, yet it is the way of the world that 
people must suffer for their own errors. It is 
thus that they learn to correct themselves — not 
by being instructed and excused, over and over, 
but by bitter experience. It is not just that 
those who were not dominated by illusion, or had 
worked themselves out of it, should pay for the 
damage resulting from the ecstasy and intoxica- 
tion of the obsessed. The German people have 
stood for the destruction and rape that have been 
perpetrated upon other people's homes and 
women ; it is right that they should expiate all 
this in the small and insufficient degree possible. 
Much is irreparable ; reparation for the reparable 
should be sternly exacted. Only thus can the 
illusion and obsession be dispelled. The way to see 
one's actions as they are is to be held accountable 
for their results ; and many a man changes his 
ways when he is once forced to visualize them as 
others see them. There are no fruits more meet 
for repentance than those tendered, voluntarily 
or not, in restitution and reparation. 

There has got to be a real right-about here. 
Life would not be livable for most of humanity 
if the German ideas and power should prevail. 
The fact that most of humanity now sees the peril 



ON FALTERING AT THE FINISH 171 

and is in arms against the dominance of that for 
which Germany stands is eloquent witness to this 
contention. Here is the revelation of a startling 
danger to the world. It is like the discovery of 
an unsuspected malignant tumor in the body. 
Now that we have had to go in with the knife and 
have uncovered an insidiousness of menace that 
is simply incredible, the operation should not be 
stayed by false humanitarianism until the roots 
of the disorder are removed. This is not vin- 
dictiveness or inhumanity ; it is, on the contrary, 
common sense and an exhibition of the highest 
humanity. The wholesome development of hu- 
man society is unthinkable with this menace 
always in its vitals. And as for hitting an enemy 
when down, who would apply that rule of chivalry 
to a serpent .f* It is not the men that are the 
target for the blows, I repeat — it is the thing the 
men stand for ; only, as long as they stand for 
the venomous and detestable thing and hug it to 
them, they should expect to stop the blows that 
are levelled at it. 

The victory is not here, but it is only delayed. 
However long the delay, it is not too early to con- 
sider the terms of settlement. Whatever these 
are to be, this country has no business to intro- 
duce palliation for the culprit where it has not 



172 THEOUGH WAR TO PEACE 

done the suffering. If any of the belligerents 
who has borne the burden and pain of oppression 
and humiliation wants to ease up on the defeated 
aggressor — if Belgium or France, for example, 
wishes so to do — that is in order. But for us, 
who for many months have reposed in a safety 
bought by others' sacrifices, to introduce any 
element of condonement is worse than imperti- 
nent. Our attitude should be an humble one 
xmtil we have suffered something of what the rest 
have suffered and attained something of the 
dignity that goes with it. The Allies are not 
revengeful barbarians ; they will be magnani- 
mous enough without us to teach them. They 
have met the peril face to face, and they agree 
that they want restitution, reparation, and guar- 
antees. Entering fresh, as we do, later in the 
struggle, we might easily, when it comes to a 
settlement, introduce an element of easygoing 
and careless generosity which would amount to 
faltering at the finish. Our part is to realize the 
seriousness of this situation, drop all dallying 
with preconceptions and soft imaginings, and see 
it through to a genuine fijiish. 



XVII. ON INTELLIGENT ADJUSTMENT 
TO THE INEVITABLE 

This gigantic world-convulsion is not the end 
of all things. It may seem so to the simple- 
minded individual whose horizon is bounded by 
his suffering. Similar periods in the world's 
history have led to despairing prophecies of the 
world's end or of the advent of some super- 
natural power, as alone competent to bring order 
out of bewilderment and confusion. This is only 
the end of some things and the beginning of 
others. If the great issue is decided now, we shall 
enter, not upon a new and strange societal order, 
but upon one which has shaken ojff enormous im- 
pediments and may now attain, unhampered, to 
closer adjustment to life-conditions along the 
lines of its vindicated code. If, on the contrary, 
the decision is lost by us, or drawn, or not com- 
pleted to its finish, we shall go on to the next 
stage of a protracted period of conflict and se- 
lection, with all its attendant misery. If the 
civilized world cannot now rise in its might, it will 

173 



174 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

have to do so, later on, amidst throes of human 
pain to which the present ones are as preliminary 
twinges. But the selection will take place — 'then, 
if not now. 

This war is not an unique affair, except in the 
matter of scale. It is discharging war's normal 
function, just as it did when Roman fought 
Carthaginian or when Napoleon's armies swept 
over Europe. Every such war uprooted some 
codes and societal structures and made room for 
the persistence and growth of others. Now, in 
the perspective of history, reason generally ap- 
plauds the results. In any case they are what 
has enabled the modern world to become what 
it is. These results are also in sequence, ex- 
hibiting a trend from a code we call savage, 
through the barbaric, to the civilized. Occasional 
retrograde movements are to be found, but they 
are presently made up for. Judging by the past, 
it is unbelievable that civilization can go back on 
its course and stay there. This is the broad 
reason for inferring that the cause of the Allies, 
backed by the approval of most of what used to 
be called the civilized world, cannot permanently 
fail. It cannot, because the code it defends is 
one long ago proved to be a better adaptation to 
the life-conditions of societies than a code in- 



ADJUSTMENT TO THE INEVITABLE 175 

eluding the elements which characterize the 
present challenging code. 

The extension of the peace-group is a scarcely 
interrupted evolutionary process, and there is no 
discoverable reason why it should not be further 
extended, this present vicious challenge once 
repelled. The code of this peace-group, in so 
far as the latter had taken form previous to the 
challenge, has shown no change in its essentials 
as it has expanded over a wider and wider client- 
age. Its democracy is in the air and has been 
automatically enlarging its sphere of influence, 
decade by decade, until the challenge came. 
War, on the contrary, with militarism and au- 
tocracy, has been on the steady decline for a long 
time, and even the warlike, militaristic, and 
autocratic peoples have nominally repudiated it. 
This war is really between peoples who say they 
are peace-loving, industrial, and democratic, and 
are, and peoples who say they are all these things, 
and are not. Both sides lay claim to the more 
expedient code of peace, and thereby vindicate 
its prospects of extension ; both sides claim to 
abhor the code of violence and thereby point to 
its eventual decline, if not elimination. In view 
of such considerations, I cannot see a lasting 
victory for any other code of international con- 



176 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

duct than the one now challenged. With such 
convictions, it is impossible to be permanently 
depressed over the incidents of the selective 
process. 

It matters, of course, that the Bolsheviki are 
writing themselves down in the Shakespearean 
fashion; but it does not matter vitally. It 
matters when you are among the trees but not 
when you view the woods. This whole situation 
is quite out of the hands of individuals like Lenine, 
or Hindenburg, or the Kaiser, Individuals mat- 
ter some, but not much, or vitally, or in the 
long run. We see the chips, but it is the tide 
that counts. This human fragment is borne 
prominently upon a tide of rebellion; the tide 
rushes on to dominance and he is the founder of 
a new nation or dispensation ; the tide is checked 
and turned back, and he is a traitor of inglorious 
memory; the tide sweeps forward again, with 
renewed power, and he is a martyr, born before 
his time. 

Societal evolution is a vast process, where the 
forces are massive and act with unhurried de- 
liberation, endlessly interlocking, within a spa- 
cious field. "Ein wechselnd Weben, Ein gliihend 
Leben." There are dim ages of the process be- 
hind us, and ages untold yet to come. Selection 



ADJUSTMENT TO THE INEVITABLE 177 

occurs at every stage, and is but an episode along 
the course. 

How then can men do anything, if all is de- 
termined by such cosmic power ? Why struggle ? 
Well, man can do something with gravitation, 
with the expansive power of steam, with the germ- 
plasm stream, although he can control the pro- 
cesses themselves in no degree. He can move 
things about, into the path, or out of the path of 
natural forces. He can place the mill-wheel be- 
neath the falling water. He can place the cylinder 
in the way of the steam. He can isolate or bring 
together the sexes of animals. This has been 
done so successfully for man's interest and welfare 
that man has conceived the idea that he is master 
of nature. But what he has done is to learn 
nature's ways and adapt his action to them. At a 
pinch he is nature's plaything and victim : the 
earth shakes a little, and his great works collapse ; 
the volcano spills a little gas over its crater-rim 
upon a town, and the lords of nature lay them 
down and are still. 

It is not otherwise with the elemental forces 
of the societal realm. They cannot be mastered ; 
they must be studied and known and adjusted 
to, as a condition of societal well-being. The 
efforts of many a would-be benefactor and up- 



178 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

lifter of the race are sterile or even harmful be- 
cause he is trying to do what he would realize, if 
he knew what a society is, and what can and can- 
not be done with it, to be out of the question. 
Every one knows that water will not run uphill ; 
yet in the societal realm there have been plenty 
of well-meaning people, through the ages, who 
have worn out and wasted their lives in unhappi- 
ness, trying ineffectually to overcome a societal 
tendency and law which are equally inevitable. 
If an ignoramus plays about in a chemical labo- 
ratory, we keep our distance, for we expect trouble 
as a result of ignorance of chemical substances 
and laws. Knowledge of the experimenter's good 
intentions does not reassure us at all. But we 
easily permit the uninformed to prowl about the 
structure of society, poking and tinkering, ap- 
parently in the belief that, provided his intentions 
are good, nothing but human weal can result. We 
are bound to learn, sometime, that powerful 
forces are at work within the societal range, and 
that ignorant tampering is even more dangerous 
here than elsewhere because so many more people 
have to endure the consequences. Then we shall 
want more knowledge of these forces, that we 
may adjust to them. 

The present is a sort of orgy of dislocation and 



ADJUSTMENT TO THE INEVITABLE 179 

of alteration in the conditions of society's life. 
In the early pages of this little book I have cited 
a selection of unplanned and unforeseen adjust- 
ments that are already in the process of painful 
birth. And I have gone on to show some of the 
exhibitions of the societal forces, in this their 
period and phase of inexorable stress and strain. 
Many of the barriers which we have raised be- 
tween ourselves and the raw and remorseless vio- 
lence of primordial power have now broken down 
and must be painfully built up again. It is a time 
for knowledge and for the broadest outlook. It 
is a time for perspective of the past, that we may 
not become involved in vain hopes or uncalled- 
for despairs. It is a time when we must under- 
stand the forces determining the evolution and 
life of human society as well as possible, that we 
may move things into and out of their path with 
the idea of utilizing their power in the interest of 
human well-being. 

Intelligent adjustment to the known inevitable 
is as rare on earth as automatic adjustment to the 
unknown inevitable is common. But the former 
is an abridged and less painful process. Adapta- 
tion is sure, because it is the condition of comfort 
and of life itself. Adaptability is that which 
hurries and eases the process. Of all earthly 



180 THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 

things that which possesses the supreme capacity 
for swift adaptation is the human mind. But 
that capacity is undeveloped, fettered in its action 
by pseudo-knowledge, bias, caprice, and senti- 
mentality — except where tests and verification 
are immediate and conclusive, and where, there- 
fore, knowledge is almost automatically acquired. 
Nowhere is real knowledge and science so little in 
intelligent demand as in the societal realm, for the 
latter is self-sown to whims and dreams of all 
varieties. It is thought that man can here have 
his own will ; here, at last and at least, he is 
lord. He senses no elemental powers in the field. 
Here, of all places, he needs but to plan and 
"create"; pass resolutions and regulations; 
think out Utopias in bed and then rise and gird 
himself to their realization ; abolish property or 
the family, or government, or religion. Nat- 
urally he is taken by the theory that societal 
evolution is by individual purposeful action. 
Naturally he regards insistence upon the control 
exerted by spontaneous, automatic, and imper- 
sonal forces as an assault upon his "free will." 

Sometimes, in a crisis, the verities stand forth 
and enforce to themselves an attention which 
they do not get in ordinary times. Many people 
are now perplexed and in weak despair because 



ADJUSTMENT TO THE INEVITABLE 181 

their comfortable little formulas crack and break 
under the weight of explanation laid upon them. 
Perhaps it is a favorable occasion to offer the con- 
tention that "social theory" is not wholly aca- 
demic after all. 

But the thesis of this little book is not thus 
general. I have aimed at an entirely practical 
application of evolutionary theory to a particu- 
lar episode in the evolution of human society. 
For those whose convictions run with mine, a 
quite definite line of action is indicated. It is 
possible enough to arrive at the same convictions 
without going through a course of reasoning in 
self -justification ; but, as I said at the outset, no 
faith was ever weakened by the support of reason. 



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By ALBERT GALLOWAY KELLER 

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